IW SS AS QQ \ \\ SS AN SS SS AIK — \\ S \ SS RRR SNS Cs SY SSS SAN MAX RX SS CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY R.S.Hosmer rl ornel F 74C8 S671 Centennial of the Social ol TT er: Library Circle in Conco iii lin DATE DUE E iia ag S67] THE ’ CENTENNIAL OF THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD March 21, 1882 “Take my wish that your bright social circle on earth Forever may flourish in cozcord and mirth” Chas. Morris's Farewell to the Beef Steak Club, London, 1831 CAMBRIDGE PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS 1882 A1#8l2 } In accepting the request of the Circle to prepare and superintend the printing of a suitable volume, containing the addresses made at the Centennial, with an Appendix, in- cluding a complete list of members, etc., and the Memoirs of the Earlier Members before 1795, the fear was expressed that the performance of the trust would disappoint the expecta- tions of the Circle. With the kind aid of those most inter- ested this volume is the result, and in the hope that it will prove not unworthy of the occasion, and acceptable to the members, it is respectfully submitted by their obliged assa- ciate. JOHN S. KEYES. ConcorD, AZril, 1882. To R. W. EMERSON, E. R. HOAR, ELIJAH WOOD, LORENZO EATON, E. W. BULL, SAMUEL STAPLES, N. B. STOW, G. REYNOLDS, RICHARD BARRETT, J. M. SMITH, G. M. BROOKS, GEORGE HEYWOOD, E. C. DAMON, H. F. SMITH, GEORGE KEYES, H. J. HOSMER, G. P. How, R. N. RICE, J. F. BARRETT, F. B. SANBORN, : H. M. GROUT, E. W. EMERSON, H. J. WALCOTT, J. B. WOOD, Present Members of the Circle. CONTENTS. REMARKS OF THE CHAIRMAN, E. R. HOAR REMARKS OF JOHN S. KEYES REMARKS OF EPHRAIM W. BULL REMARKS OF HENRY M. GROUT POEM OF FRANK B. SANBORN REMARKS OF GRINDALL REYNOLDS REMARKS OF WILLIAM W. WHEILDON . REMARKS OF EDWARD W. EMERSON LETTER OF DR. EDWARD JARVIS APPENDIX. CONSTITUTION LIST OF MEMBERS ‘ ‘ REPORT ON DATE OF FORMATION MEMOIRS OF EARLY MEMBERS . wt 15 17 27 29 37 39 44 49 or 55 63 LIST OF MEMOIRS. HuMPHREY BARRETT. By Wathan Brooks SAMUEL BARTLETT. By Fosiah Bartlett Davip Brown. By F. S. Keyes EZEKIEL Brown. By G. Reynolds JOSEPH BROWN . : : : REUBEN Brown. By William Whiting EMERSON COGSWELL. By W. S. Robinson JONATHAN Fay. By } F. Barrett Jonas HEywoop. By Lorenzo Eaton JosEePpH HosMER. By Josephine Hosmer Tuomas HupparD. By Samuel Hoar JosEPpH Hunt. By William Whiting DuNCcAN INGRAHAM. By Fostah Bartlett . ELNATHAN JONES. By ¥. Bartlettand E. Wood . EPHRAIM JONES. By ¥ Bartlett and E. Wood . SAMUEL JONES. By F. Bartlett and E. Wood Jonas Ler. By 7. S. Keyes PETER WHEELER. By Cyrus Stow Joun WuitE. By Daniel Shattuck Epuraim Woop. By Elgah Wood, Fr. Joun Vose. By Cyrus Warren . Joun RicHARDSON. By George Keyes Isaac Hurp. By £. &. Hoar . Ezra RivLey. By & W. Emerson . 143 152 - 157 159 - 164 168 Ay fos ede LOE bt PYPPUCMAD SU ZO RDA PS IT: 3 L bw pry fo bY: ee Oe fooreipyy PY IE aide) Sree 84s yy SOM ite PY 2 ae Pe OMOT ea f bering ie cea if ae lt + A yprypee AAPA oe soy Y oes f Mer a for Es a a we i a Fy Je nday soe Be BMD Md ow “pony : 3 LO oo ‘aa es goo ee. py L PY P eee oe woe 2 ve Pf He 2" pe” ke ie GOD VES Pay ee ay OAS CENTENNIAL OF THE SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. N pursuance of the arrangements for the Centennial, and the previous invitation, the Social Circle in Con- cord, with their invited guests, met at the house of Mr. Reuben N. Rice on the evening of March 21, 1882; and were called to order by Mr. H. J. Walcott, the Secretary. On motion of Mr. Rice the Hon. E. R, Hoar was chosen chairman of the occasion. Taking the chair Judge Hoar said :— Gentlemen of the Social Circle, and Ladies connected with it by blood or marriage, who are to-night its honored guests : — We are met to celebrate the completion of a hundred years of the existence of our society. It is undoubtedly more than a century since it originated, probably from the Committee of Public Safety of the early days of the Revolu- tion, and, according to well authenticated tradi- tion, about the year 1777 or 1778. But it had some breaks in the continuity of its organiza- tion; and its perfect identity can be best estab- I 2 CENTENNIAL OF THE lished by the date inscribed in the label on the cover of this its first and only book of records, which appears to have been procured for the use of the Circle in 1782. Nothing, however, was recorded in the book until the Constitution was copied into it under the date of 1794, from which time its history seems to be unbroken and complete. The Constitution begins with this preamble: “ To strengthen the social affections and dissem- inate useful communications among its members, we, whose names are hereunto subjoined, do hereby agree to form ourselves into a society, by the name of the Social Circle, in Concord, and to adopt the following rules and regulations, namely.” And then follow the few simple pro- visions for electing members, limiting the num- ber to twenty-five,— about the extent of the capacity of a Concord parlor, — for holding the meetings on Tuesday evenings through the win- ter season from October to March, and for the modest draught of cider, flip, grog, or toddy, which the customs of the time deemed suitable to the hospitality of a social gathering, — asking a: neighbor “to take something,”— but scrupu- lously guarding against excess by the injunction that the entertainment should be moderaze. And now, with no material alteration of its original plan, this little institution of our fathers, this gathering of townsmen and neighbors for SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 3 friendly and instructive conversation and confer- ence, sometimes at the house of Mr. John Vose, at an expense of five shillings and three pence an evening, but usually at the houses of its members in rotation, has held on its regular and peaceful course for one hundred years! With- out even the cohesion of a corporate existence, with no secrets or passwords or high-sounding titles, with only the ties of neighborhood and friendliness, and a common interest in the wel- fare of each other and of the town, it has been a noticeable part of the life and history of Con- cord. Its Centennial seems to its members wor- thy of honorable observance. Its founders were patriots of the Revolution. It has attracted to its quiet gatherings the substantial farmers, me- chanics, and traders of the town, and its meet- ings have been graced by such culture and dis- tinction as the town could furnish. Among its members have been the pillars of our little com- munity. It has included on its roll of one hun- dred and twenty-four names our most influen- tial citizens at home, and those best known in the county and the State: seven clergymen, nine physicians, fifteen lawyers, two sheriffs of the county, four deputy sheriffs, four jailers, three editors, two presidents and two cashiers of the bank, five judges, three members of Congress, one lieutenant-governor, and one United States marshal, members of both branches of the Gen- 4 CENTENNIAL OF THE eral Court and of the Governor’s Council, treas urers of the State, county, and town, town clerks and selectmen, magistrates and deacons. The average period of membership has been about twenty years, giving to each member on an aver- age the opportunity to attend five hundred meet- ings. Its strength has been in its simplicity, and in the social affections which it has strength- ened. We welcome to-night the wives and daughters to whose household cares and labors the Social Circle has been so often and so much indebted ; and with cordial good wishes to each other, and tender and respectful memory of our honored predecessors, at this dividing point in two cen- turies meet “ to report progress, and ask leave to sit again.” At the close of his address, after the applause had sub- sided, the CHAIRMAN said: ‘“ Gentlemen, our senior member and respected friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom no Con- cord meeting or gathering ever failed to delight to hear, I am told must not be asked to speak to us to-night. His presence, which fills our number, is itself a source of happi- ness to all of you.” Mr. Emerson bowed his acknowledgment of the cordial greeting of the Circle. The Cuairman then said: “The exercises of the Circle this evening are to include such reminiscences and remarks as those of our members, who are willing to address us, choose to make. And I will first invite our next, after my- self, oldest member, who may be considered the historian of the Social Circle to some extent, who first suggested and SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 5 has aided so much in carrying out the plan of having a series of biographies of deceased members, Judge Keyes, to address us.” REMARKS OF HON. JOHN S. KEYES. Mr. Cuarrman, —I had planned in my own mind something to say, and supposed this meet- ing would be as the ordinary ones are, somewhat informal, and that a talk among the members of the Circle would be in order; but finding myself within a day or two so much affected by a serious cold as to have lost what few ideas I had, and all my voice, and'thinking that I might not be able to get here to-night, I wrote out (to send bya friend if I did not come) what I had to say, and since you have set the example, sir, of reading, if the Circle will indulge me in the present state of my lungs, I will read what I have to offer. “Little of all we value here, Wakes on the morn of its hundredth year, Without both looking and feeling queer,” says Holmes of “ The Deacon’s One Horse Shay,” and ‘so may we of this Social Circle to-night, gathered to celebrate its Centennial. Whether the rest of the verse, — “Tn fact there ’s nothing that keeps.its youth, So far as I know, but a tree, and truth,” — 6 CENTENNIAL OF THE is equally applicable to us, is not quite so evi- dent, though our right as a club to partake of the nature of the tree from which it is cut can- not well be doubted. At all events, this spectacle of the presence of ladies for the first time at our twenty-four hun- dredth meeting, however queer it may make us feel and look, is a proof of our youth if not of our truth, and shows that the world moves, and we can’t quite help, if we would, moving with it. But to-night we must begin, according to all rules, by retracing our steps and going back, in our thoughts, a hundred years, to see the begin- ning of this ancient institution. The Concord of 1782 differed from our own, not more in size and wealth than in ideas and opinions. A score or two of dwellings formed the village; to each and every one either a farm or a workshop gave the needed support. One minister, one doctor, and one lawyer, answered their spiritual, physical, and moral needs. Then there was no post-office nor regular mail. The letters were brought and taken by casual trav- elers or the chances of the road; and the weekly newspapers, for there were no dailies, by the car- riers or teamsters, as stages or public convey- ances had not started. There was no library, public or private, and but few books. No ly- ceum, or public lectures, save the regular Thurs- day sermon in the church. No masonic lodge, SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 7 and no good templars, not even a temperance society, and everybody drank what they wanted, and could get. No clubs, Concord, B. C. W,, philosophical, or Shakespearian. No women voters or women’s rights movements. No char- itable society, bible society, Sunday-school, or missionary concerts. No Christmas, Fourth of July, Twenty-second of February, only Fast and Thanksgiving for holydays, and courts and train- ings for public amusement. No balls, no socia- bles, no germans. The meeting-house had nei- ther fire nor lights, neither vestry nor kitchen, no pews and no fences; it was open to all comers, and free to all winds, if only of sound doctrine. There were no sidewalks, no street lamps, no water pipes, no fire-engines, no almshouse, no monuments nor statues, in the town. All these, _and railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, have come in this century, and stoves and furnaces beside. Except the town meeting and the church, there was not an organization or association of ‘any kind in Concord when this Circle was formed. Even the school was movable; the only one, the grammar, kept twelve weeks in the centre, and six weeks each in the six outer districts, and the town raised £100 that year, instead of $12,000 this year, for education, so called. Dancing was prohibited, musical instru- ments, save a drum and fife, existed not, singing schools were not kept, and even psalm singing 8 CENTENNIAL OF THE had to be deaconed “line by line,” possibly to enforce “ precept upon precept.” The Revolution that began here had ended at Yorktown triumphantly, but peace was not yet declared, or independence acknowledged. It was a time of doubt, distress, hardship, and pov- erty. The Committee of Safety, that for seven long years had met weekly to consult and help on the struggle, had done its work and closed its sessions. The debts of the war were yet to be paid, the government yet to be established. There was much to be considered and discussed. To do this effectively and well there must be meetings, and these must be social to be useful and agreeable. So this Social Circle began. There is of course the mystery and myth about its origin and founders, common to all great and ancient institutions, to pique curiosity and start antiquarian research. The earlier records are missing, or were never kept. The scrap of bind- ing on the old and solitary book of records alone gives the date 1782. But from history and tra- dition so much has been gleaned, and this is all we know. What old letter, or diary, or memo- randum may hereafter turn up most unexpect- edly, to show that this date is incorrect, we can only guess. Enough for us is the fact of this Centennial. The score of men who first formed the Circle, Judge Wood, Squire Jonas Heywood, and Cap- SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 9 tain David Brown, of the Committee of Safety; Elnathan Jones, Samuel Bartlett, and Deacon John White, traders of the village ; Humphrey Barrett, Joseph Hosmer, and Thomas Hubbard, of the solid farmers; Duncan Ingraham and Jonas Lee, the gentlemen; Emerson Cogswell and Ephraim Jones, the tavern keepers; Jona- than Fay the lawyer, Joseph Hunt the doctor, Reuben Brown the saddler, Samuel Jones the blacksmith, Peter Wheeler the butcher, Joseph Brown the myth, and Ezekiel Brown the army surgeon, comprised much of the strength and character of the town. The minister had been so recently settled and married, that he was con- sidered too young for the Circle, or perhaps there were some members who preferred the deacon to the parson. All these resided in the village, and were neighbors within easy walking distance of each other. This may account for not find- ing the names of other prominent men, who lived farther off from the centre, in the list. It was the era of constitution making. The State had just made hers. The United States were at work on theirs, and with this spirit in the air, these men made one for the Circle, so simple, so wise, so safe, that it has lasted for a century almost unaltered. It is short; will you listen to the reading? (See Appendix.) Observe the simplicity, conciseness, and orig- inality. No officers to get up election contests Io CENTENNIAL OF THE about: a secretary to keep the records was all. The chairman was the member at whose house the meeting was held; no fines or penalties for non-attendance, no assessments to quarrel over, no rules parliamentary or other to be observed or broken; an organization, and mode of filling its vacancies. Only this, and nothing more. Is it a wonder that it has lasted a century, possess- ing as it does the charm of a club to which any one admitted as a member knows that all but one have voted favorably, and answering a social need more felt then than now, of personal inter- course ? In all these hundred years there have been found but two changes in this Constitution de- sirable. One, adopted by common consent rather than vote, growing out of our changed habits of life, substituting a supper for the drinks named. The other, from the growth of the town, making a ballot for a candidate for membership, in the place of an application, as, when there are so many gentlemen ready to join such a circle, the preferences of the members can thus be ex- pressed more easily and without black-balling. As there have been but two changes, so there have been but two breaks, in its century of ex- istence. The first arising from the smouldering heat of the revolutionary troubles, in which Dr. Ezekiel Brown, that. hot-headed, long-winded, hard-used, rough-tongued, ill-bred, “jack at all SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. II trades,” from cobbler, trader, to army surgeon, would out-talk his neighbors, especially choleric old Duncan Ingraham, who had always leaned to the royal side of the quarrel, and as agent for an English firm had sued and imprisoned Brown for debt, until the staying away of the more peaceably inclined left the Circle empty. The removal from town of one of these com- batants soon revived the meetings, and it went on flourishing till one or two members intro- duced the practice of giving suppers. This did not meet with favor, and the attendance again fell off and stopped the meetings for a short period. Again it was revived; and under the article providing that the refreshment should be moderate, it has had no difficulty in “keeping the even tenor of its way” to the present time. Of course, in this long period of years, vari- ous traditions have gathered like mosses on an old tree trunk about this institution. The most prominent that was well established in the annals of the Circle, among the oldest members this generation has known, and reaches back to the first third of its life, is, that all the members were never present at a meeting, and that if they should all attend, the Circle would inevitably break up. Various attempts to test the truth of the first part of this tradition have been made, but without success, until two years ago, when accidentally, one pleasant evening while the Cir- 12 CENTENNIAL OF THE cle were engaged in looking over the printed account of the centennial meeting of the Boston Wednesday Club (the only older organization of the kind in this country), which had been kindly presented to us, the room gradually filled up, and it was soon noticed that all but two were present. They were soon summoned, and for the first time the whole twenty-five stood up and were counted. Thereupon it was solemnly voted, that, instead of breaking up, the Circle should renew its youth, and here in this cele- bration you have a proof of how well it has lived up to that vote. By a curious coinci- dence, that same evening the first meeting for organizing the junior club, called the Tuesday, was held, resulting in a success that promises to be worthy of its founders! So that, like most old traditions, when this was actually tested, it was found that instead of injury resulting ad- vantages accrued. But two instances, within the recollection of the oldest member, have occurred when the meetings have been omitted entirely, and these were occasioned by the deaths of the members at whose houses they were to have been held, both so well remembered by all of you now present, J. M. Cheney and A. G. Fay, Esquires. In this hundred years of existence, ninety-nine members have left the Circle, half by death, a sixth by resignation, and a third by removal from SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 13 Concord. Six only of the past members are now living, and we are glad to meet even one of them once more to-night. The absent ones we trusted and hoped would be with us, but dis- tance and infirmity have prevented. To that one present and to those absent, we tender our congratulations that they have survived so long their deprivation of the Circle. And this brings up the consideration of the great work of the Circle. It, perhaps, has left undone many things it might and ought, if it has never done what it ought not; but of all whereof there is any record, from the vaccination of the citizens in the early days of that discovery, the establishment of the Concord Bank, the drainage of the mill-pond nuisance, the founding of the cemetery, the improvement of the town in many ways, the chief and best of its work consists in the biographies of its deceased members. Of the ninety-three who have died, all but two have more or less worthy memoirs written and read to the Circle, and carefully preserved in its archives. Copied, in the order of their admis- sion to the Circle, into the large book (that cap- tured in a blockade runner was intended for the records of the confederate government), seventy- five of these memoirs fill three hundred pages of this great folio, and the rest, when thus copied, will add another hundred pages of memorial his- tory that has no parallel in this country. It is 14 CENTENNIAL OF THE more than a history of Concord since the Revo- lution. It is the life and character of the town for the past century, set down on paper so far as it can be transcribed and truly photographed. Of the ninety and nine past members, twenty- three were of the learned professions, twenty-two were farmers, twenty mechanics, nineteen traders, five inn-keepers, three editors, three clerks, two manufacturers, one historian, one unknown, but called captain. If there are no-teachers in the list, it should be noted that the teachers of the grammar school and academy were for many years invited as honorary members to attend the Circle. Five were colonels, two majors, twelve captains, and many lieutenants of the militia. Twenty-two were college graduates, nineteen at Harvard, and three at Dartmouth. Fifty, or one more than half, were natives of Concord. Five were bachelors, the rest married,—a majority but once, a fourth part twice, a tenth part three times, and the rest so very much married that the count is not easily kept. As there were no bachelors in the original list, so there are none now. - Such was the Circle in the past. What it is in the present is before you to-night. Of the future one thing is certain, that while it lasts Concord will be safe, even if the School of Phi- losophy is at one end of the town, and the State Prison at the other. SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 15 THE CHAIRMAN said: “ The next oldest member in point of years is a gentleman who has enjoyed a fame in some respects exceeding that of most members of the Circle, as not merely spreading through this country, but making itself known in France and Italy, the originator: of the Concord Grape ; and I will ask Mr. E. W. Bull if he has anything to say about the Circle, or his acquaintance with it?” REMARKS OF HON, E. W. BULL. Mr. PresipEnT, — I am an old member of the club, and know it well; but all that can be said about the club seems to me has been so well said, that there should be no repetition of it; but I want to say how much I like this good old town of Concord. I was born in Boston so long since as when it had its forty thousand and was proud of it. The population was homogeneous; there was a manhood and a breadth about the people, —a liberality which we all boasted of and ad- mired. ° When, in later years, a pulmonary affection compelled me to go into the country, it was my good fortune to come to this town of Concord. When the doctor said I must go into the coun- try, I dreaded a suburban residence. “ Suburbs,” as William Robinson used to say, “are places where six hundred dollars a year looks down on five hundred, and if you do not belong to our coterie, we can have nothing to do with you.” But in Concord I found a more complete type 16 CENTENNIAL OF THE of the old-time manhood than we could claim in Boston. The liberality of the people was remarkable to me, and to this day it is their characteristic. It has sent its men to the battle- field to die for their country; it has sent to our courts of law and to our Congress men eminent in character and irreproachable in life. We may well, I think, boast of those eminent men who have made, in Congress, our laws, who have administered our laws, who have fought our battles, who have stood up for the right with their utmost strength, and our incorrupti- ble judges, with whom we have served the State. To our ladies, I am sure, we owe a debt of grat- itude which can never be repaid. Foremost in all good works, in the hospital, even on the bat- tle-field, in time of war indefatigable in work- ing for the soldiers, and charitable and helpful at home to the poor. I said to you, Mr. President, that I did not feel that I could make any speech or say any- thing which would interest you, and I must close my remarks now. I want to give you a senti- ment; I want to say, — This good old town of Concord, may its shadow never be less! Tue Cuairman: “To pass from the older to the more recent members of the Circle, we should be happy to hear something from Dr. Grout.” SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 17 ADDRESS OF THE REV. H. M. GROUT, D. D. Mr. Cuarrman, — I am quite at a loss for any good reason for being called upon to say any- thing on this occasion. I am neither a historian nor poet; nor, unfortunately, sufficiently venera- ble to be able to indulge in personal reminis- cences. As for anecdote and wit, it is doubtful if I was ever suspected of any gifts at either. Possibly it is for the sake of variety that you have drawn me into this net ; to make the bright things of the hour more bright by a little suit- able contrast. In this view, even dullness may have its place and use. _It strikes me that one of the good things of this particular Circle is the agreeable and profit- able way it provides for spending a portion of one’s leisure. There is hardly a surer means of determining the grade of a man’s culture, his intellectual quality, his moral proclivities, and his religious character, than by observing where he goes and what he does when the day’s work is over. Teach a people to spend their evenings and holidays and Sundays wisely, and you have made them prosperous, virtuous, and happy. You have beforehand settled all the great ques- tions which so perplex social reformers. Noth- ing, of course, can rightly or really displace the restful. and uplifting delights of home. This may be taken for granted. Anything which 2 18 CENTENNIAL OF THE robs the home is no blessing: it is a curse. But families are not made better by complete isolation. One needs larger social contact with his kind, — ‘“* After the day’s work, the evening’s guest ; After weeks of toil, holiday rest.” It is out of some such natural craving and need as this that club life has grown. But there are differences in club life. Not much is to be said for those kinds which are mainly convivial. Nor is it certain that the very highest ideal is reached in the guild, or association of men of a single class. Mechanics’ associations and art clubs and literary coteries, which bring together persons of similar callings and tastes and exclude others, are excellent. It is doubtful if they are the best. It has been noticed that one gets sur- est command of his strongest faculties by culti- vating those that tend to counterbalance them. The man of fervid imagination needs the regu- lation of occupations that require common sense. Practical business capacity is rather helped than hindered by indulgence in things that address the fancy. I do not know that it would be safe, in this presence, to affirm that .the favorite read- ing of successful lawyers is generally poetry and fiction. But this has been said to be the fact. It is clear that the best balanced men, as men, are never formed by either pursuits or associa- tions of a single kind. As a rule, men thus SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 19 formed are neither sound in judgment nor gen- erous in spirit. So I take it to be one of the distinctively good things of this Circle that it is not made up of men of one kind. I understand it has always included persons the most diverse in activity and thought. One would have to go far to find a community in which it would be possible to bring together a company of such varied pur- suits, and I think I may say so diverse religious opinions, as are now represented here: the bench, the bar, the pulpit, medicine, literature, journal- ism, horticulture, agriculture, banking, manufact- ures, and trade, — about all the professions and callings essential to a civilized state. And so, perforce, we keep alive all human sympathies; we are taken out of professional ruts; we are brought into contact with each other’s virtues. Almost more, than would be anywhere else pos- sible, we here come to estimate each other as men. Whatever we may fancy ought to be the tendency of principles other than our own, we learn at least to honor each other’s hearts and lives. The man who, seen only in the distance, might have been thought morose and narrow, is found to be, in fact, — “ One of the spirits chosen by Heaven to turn The sunny side of things to human eyes.” The fathers of a hundred years ago showed great wisdom, when they started this Circle, in 20 CENTENNIAL OF THE shunning every kind of class limitation ; in mak- ing the only condition of eligibility to it, that manhood which, without effort or conscious pur pose, joins, “ Each office of the social hour To noble manners, as the flower And native growth of noble mind.” To my own thought another point of interest in this Circle is, not exactly in its now ripened age, but in the kind of link with which it binds our thought and sympathy to times now well past. Old times they are; good times they were. Not that they were better than the new. In some things they were not nearly so good. But in the last hundred years we may have lost as well as gained by the marvelous changes which have come over us. Take the matter of social life. The fathers were not grim and ghastly as some seem to im- agine. They were not long-faced and misan- thropic. They knew the blessings of good cheer and merry laughter; and they took good care to have their full share of these. The very first ‘purpose of this Circle, as we have this evening been reminded, was “to strengthen the social af- fections.” It is quite true they had not attained to church sociables and town assemblies and con- certs and operas, and all the other fine and re- fined jollities which make our own times so gay. But they had their huskings and apple-parings SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 21 and spinning-matches and quiltings; and they could sing psalms in a way that would now be quite astonishing. And one may doubt if our modern merry-makings are either more pulse- quickening or health-promoting than theirs, -Who does not envy them the huge blazing fire around which the family gathered when the day’s work was done? And then, for grand occasions, the square room, with its floor made clean and sweet with finest sand, gave welcome to friendly neighbors who came with wives and children for a pleasant evening hour. If we may trust the historians of those times, ‘ there is no affectation of style. They tell stories, they laugh, they sing. They are serious or gay by turns. Or the young folks draw apart for some play, while the fathers and the mothers are discussing some hard point in theology in the minister’s last sermon, or per- haps the great danger coming to sound morals from the multiplication of turnpikes and news- papers. It may be very true that we have gained much of refinement and elegance and beauty.in our social life, but we have no keener zest for our good things than they had for theirs. Theirs certainly did not exhaust the purse, nor yet the power to enjoy simple, healthful pleas- ures. Guizot is credited with once saying there was “nothing that .France needed for its regen- eration so much as fireside diversion.” The men who. started this Circle had this. We of these times are in some danger of losing it. 22 CENTENNIAL OF THE Take the matter of intellectual life. The times to which our Centennial carries us back were not unappreciative of this; nor were they destitute of it. This also appears in the ancient Consti- tution which still binds us together. This Circle had for its second main purpose “ to disseminate - useful communications among its members.” Their ways of doing this were not ours. Could they rise from their graves, with what astonish- ment would they look. upon the books, maga- zines, and papers that load our tables and shelves ; and then, in at our public libraries and reading rooms. But it was not an unmixed ill-fortune that they had fewer printed pages than we have. Such as they had they read and pondered. They learned to think. And they also learned to con- verse. Conversation is now often reckoned as one of the arts well-nigh lost. And why should it not be, when we have so little use for it, and so little to keep us in practice. Enter a modern home some evening, and you find father, mother, and child each with his paper or book in hand; each silently intent upon the column or page before him. Neither asks or much cares what so interests the other. When bed-time comes, with a few indifferent words or a simple good- night, they separate and go to their slumbers. It was not so in olden times. Then each told what he had heard or read or thought. And when neighbors came in to enlarge the circle SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 23 about the hospitable hearth, what stories they told, and high questions they argued. To some one who asked Samuel Johnson how it was that he knew everything, he replied, “ Because I talk of everything.” Talk makes thought clear, and fixes knowledge in the mind. There was thus a real intellectual want for such a Circle as this a hundred years ago; and it still serves its grand purpose of disseminating useful communications in the good old fashion of friendly conversation. Then there are the changes which have trans- pired with respect to habits and methods of in- dustry. It is not certain that the fathers worked harder than we do. They worked hard. They had to, or dispense with life’s comforts, to say nothing of luxuries and adornments. But, in some things, they worked wiser than we do. They did not carry toils so often and far into, the night, nor exhausting pleasures either. Here, again, our wise Constitution gives us a sugges- tive hint. The meetings of this Circle were to “begin at six and end at nine o'clock.” And so work was early done, and sleep was early begun. We observed just now the way pleasure and work were often combined. Much the larger part of the old pastimes were only ordinary forms of industry with jollification intermixed. The huskings and raisings and quiltings were for profit. If a young woman went to visit a neighbor, she did not crimp or bang her hair, 24 CENTENNIAL OF THE and arm herself with a gorgeous fan and lovely card-case ; she took along her spinning-wheel, and buzzing spindles kept time with lively. tongues. The elder women took their knit- ting-needles and balls of yarn. If the poets are to be trusted, even courting was carried on in more useful ways than one must fear it some- times now is: — / “ Behold, The ruddy damsel singeth at her wheel, While by her side the rustic lover sits. Perchance his shrewd eye secretly doth count The mass of skeins that, hanging on the wall, Increaseth day by day. Perchance his thought (For men have wiser minds than women sure) Is calculating what a thrifty wife The maid will make.” It is possible that we separate our work and play _too widely ; working too intensely when we work, and then playing just as exclusively and hard. Nor is this the only interesting contrast be- tween the old-time industry and the new. With our wonderful division of labor few persons now acquire skill at more than one thing. Things once done by many hands are now done by ma- chinery, and often in a few great factories. This facilitates manufacture. It multiplies things of use and beauty. But the change does not tend to multiply large-brained and many-sided men. Why, there was hardly any good and useful SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 25 thing which the old-time Concord farmer could not do ; and reasonably well too. Having cleared his ground and planted his fields, he often built no small part of his own house. His rakes, sometimes his plows, his carts and sleds, were his own’ manufacture. He mended, if he did. not make; the family shoes. He could shear the sheep, and break and hatchel the flax. The -women, too, could not only bake the beans and roast the pig or mutton leg and milk the cows and churn the butter and press the cheese and dip the candles, they could spin the flax and wool and weave the cloth and make their own dresses and hoods. They cut and made, also, the cloth- ing of their husbands, sons, and brothers. Nor was this an exceptional thing. It was common ; and in the very best families too. We are told that Abigail Adams, the wife of our second Presi- dent, not only made a large part of the things of use and beauty in her house, but that she spun and wove and sewed her husband’s clothes. Of Dr. Leonard Woods; who graduated at Harvard College fourteen years after this Circle started, and died as lately as 1854, it is said that his en- tire graduating suit was grown on his father’s farm, and from the raw flax and wool converted into comely garments by his mother and sisters in his Princeton home. No doubt these people were awkward in manners. They would have been dazed in a modern drawing-room. But 26 ‘CENTENNIAL OF THE they knew how to do things that were useful. And, withal, they developed a versatility and courage and patience and independence of spirit which has made the real New England what it is; and us, too, what we are. Perhaps I ought to allude to that article in our Constitution which refers to one other mat- ter of great practical interest to us. It begins, as you remember, with the words, “ The refresh- ment shall be moderate.” This is a further illus- tration of the great good sense of the fathers ; and especially of their self-control on festive oc- casions. But it is enough for me just to allude to it, and to leave. the remainder of the rule to others who, just here, can comment with a bet- ter understanding, and moralize from a larger experience. I must not close without at least mentioning what seems to me to be yet another most inter- esting feature of this Circle. It is the absence’ from it of every kind of burdensome rule or ob- ligation. It is that, once in the year, we may enter each other’s homes with entire informality, as if brothers of the same household. We may be silent or speak just according to our frame or impulse. If I do not find myself in a talking mood, or the topic which interests others is one to which I am not equal, or if, as is so often the case, my lumbering wit is slow in coming up, and all my good stories have taken flight, no one SOCIAL CIRCLE [N CONCORD. 27, looks hurt; and no one seems in the least aston- ished. It is a pleasure, not often surpassed, to be allowed to be, now and then, only a respectful listener in a company of wise men, such as, la- dies, you see about you. Tue CHAIRMAN: “It has been the fortune of four mem- bers of the club, who, under its rules, had ceased to be members by removing from the town, to return and be re- elected. Fortunately none of them have yet left this world, and therefore the question whether they are to have two biographies in the book or not is an open one. Mr. Grout said that nobody could attend to but one thing; but one of our members to whom this high distinction belongs of hav- ing been twice desired by the Circle to enter its membership has, I believe, official jurisdiction over three distinct topics, two of which are very much in the line of this Circle, but the other we have not yet had occasion to invoke in its be- half, —to wit, health, lunacy, and charity, and, as the rep- resentative from the club of health and charity, I would ask Mr. Sanborn to address us.” REMARKS OF MR. F. B. SANBORN. Mr. Cuairman, — I dare say it will appear be- fore I get through that none of the subjects of which you have spoken have been entirely neg- lected. I was requested, sir, to furnish a poem for this occasion, and I made the most elaborate preparation for that purpose. I reflected that this was an occasion that happened but once in a hundred years, and that my subject was, of course, a whole century of such’ men as Judge Keyes has described; and I therefore made ar- 28 CENTENNIAL OF THE rangements for a volume about the size of “ Para- dise Lost.” Tue CuHairMay, interrupting: “I think it would be in order to move that it be read by its title.” Mr. Sanzorn, continuing,— But I reflected, as Dr. Johnson might say, that the: preparation of such a poem should have occupied a great part of the first century of the club, while its perusal would probably dispose of no small part of the coming century; and then I heard it suggested by a friend who often favors me with excellent. criticism, that probably an undertaking such as I have described might be regarded by the cen- sorious as long-winded. I have therefore brought a few fragments of this great work, and these will, I think, present themselves something as the Massachusetts Cen- tral Railroad has done of late years to persons who have had occasion to pass in its neighbor- hood or to traverse its whole route: you will see a piece here and a piece there, but the connect- ing links are not visible. I shall hope that all who hear me will endeavor as far as possible to supply the missing links. Tue CHAIRMAN, interrupting: “If Rev. Mr. Grout will pardon me for introducing the quotation, I should say, Gather up the fragments that nothing be lost.” Mr. SANBORN, continuing, — I have also, find- ing the time rather short for the preparation of SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 29 this poem, done what I was in the habit of doing when I was first elected to the club and had occasion to entertain my brethren. I laid my neighbors under contribution, — and I must ask those who hear me to take notice that all the sil- ver in this production is not my own. [The incomplete condition of Mr. Sanborn’s poem, while not such as to prevent its being heard with attention, and occasionally with cheerfulness, has yet led the author to withhold it from publication until after the Massachusetts Central Railroad shall be open for travel from Concord to Hoosack.] THE CHarrMaNn: “TI am afraid that Dr. Ripley would have considered it very singular that his successor should not have been sooner called upon to express the view of the elub that is taken from that high vantage ground, and I would ask Mr. Reynolds to say something to us.” REMARKS OF THE REV. GRINDALL REYNOLDS, A. M. I think that his successor, if you refer to me, would have been greatly delighted, if, instead of calling upon him late, you had not called upon him at all. For it seems hardly worth while, after you have listened to this prepared and ad- mirable wit and wisdom, for me to add a few vagrant words. As I have considered the import of this Cen- tennial gathering, and as I have been sitting here and thinking it over, and have heard what has been said of our origin and history, it has seemed to me, that one noteworthy thing in that origin 30 CENTENNIAL OF THE and history is the date at which the Social Circle, began to be. It came into existence just at the turning-point in the life of the town, and, as in the miniature you get the representation of the great whole, so, I presume, just as truly at the turning-point in the national life. It stood be- tween the old and the new. Behind it was the memory of one hundred and fifty years of hard- ship and struggle, in which this little settlement with difficulty maintained itself, wrestling with the powers of nature, and withstanding the forces of adverse men. Before it was the vision of hope, of great and noble progress. You study that past, and you perceive that for the first forty years the town was engrossed by continuous and wearing labors simply that it might live; that for the next hundred and ten years it was engaged in a contest almost as con- tinuous and scarcely less wearing with more dis- tant forces and obstacles, which were as real as the hardships of the forest, the poverty of fron- tier life, or the enmity of the Indians of Massa- chusetts Colony. I refer to the many exhausting wars with that European power, which on this continent stood opposed to the English settlers, and with the savage tribes that were in alliance with it. As one result of such unpropitious conditions, few organizations of any kind existed in Con- cord, or could exist. You count them up, the SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 31 church, the schools, the town meeting, and, if I mistake not, we must add one more to Judge Keyes’ brief list, the cavalry company, the oldest military organization in Massachusetts, if we ex- cept the Ancient and Honorable Artillery. Life was too hard, too bitter a fight, to permit luxu- ries, social or physical. So the Social Circle came into existence just as this long period of sacrifice and endurance, incident to frontier life, was closing. In the nature of things it could hardly have come into existence before. The next fifty years were years of high expec- tation and of great advancement. New roads were opened; new bridges built; new enterprises undertaken; new associations formed. There were better schools, better society. In thought I run over the history of the town. I can scarcely recall anything of an organized kind, now exist- ing, which was not created in those years be- tween 1782 and 1832. Our banks, our insur- ance company, our agricultural society, our ma- sonic lodge, our manufacturing establishments, and even the beginnings of our noble public library, all date back to that period, to testify what hope and fresh life came in with the close of the Revolution, and to bear witness to the new vigor, independence, and social power, which were the outgrowths of the Revolution. And it is a pleasant thing to remember that the organ- ization, whose hundredth birthday we are now 32 CENTENNIAL OF THE keeping, was the first-born among these various associations. So it is not a fanciful statement to say that this Social Circle began at a period which marks pretty definitely the transition in the town from the old to the new; when men were both looking back to the somewhat sombre memories of the past, and looking forward to the cheerful expectations of the future. We were leaving behind poverty, danger, difficulty, and entering upon new and growing life. I cannot but think that that new and growing life was to a wonderful degree directed by the men who be- longed to this Circle; directed in a very simple and informal way, but in a very real and striking way; that it has been no vain boast, that amid the free, untrammeled, and. useful communica- tions of its weekly meetings, many of the plans and enterprises which have been so helpful have been formed and matured. As I came into this room I noticed, as each one of you must have noticed, the portraits of our old members which have been. hung upon these walls. They are the portraits of the men who, quite as much as any, have made Concord what it is; who impressed themselves upon its life. And, as I looked upon them, it seemed to me not only had our Circle had great influence in directing that opening and expanding life, of which we see to-day the results, but that Judge Keyes spoke a very true word, when, a few mo- : SOCIAL CIRCLE [N CONCORD. 33 ments ago, he recognized the great value of the work of the Circle in its book of biographies. In that book are preserved, if I mistake not, some- thing more than the few bare facts and outlines of lives which memory or scanty annals would naturally hand down, and something more than the curious and characteristic anecdotes which have become traditions, even the genuine savor of the lives themselves. The men who, in by- gone times, were among the most striking fig- ures in our town history, have been clothed with a personality almost as distinct and vital as they had in their life, by the thought and investiga- tion which have been given to the formation of their biographies, and by the conversation and criticism which have corrected and enriched those memoirs, as in our meetings they have been read, and with frankest spirit considered. Run back now over the history of our club. Recall these men of what I may term its first era, — the era of its formation. How inwrought their lives were with the life of the town! There was Major Hosmer, the man whose word was the final cause which, amid a long chain of causes, occasioned Concord fight; when, look- ing from the hill down upon our village, and seeing the smoke from the burning of some of the military stores, he felt that the enemy were destroying their homes, and that he could not a moment longer remain passive, and vehemently 3 34 CENTENNIAL OF THE exclaimed, “ Would you let them burn the town down?” There was old Captain David Brown, whose homestead was within sight of North Bridge. He led the first Concord company to the attack, and in tradition almost disputes with Captain Davis, of Acton, the foremost place in that advance; and when the battle was over, and he had done his part, came home and recorded the story of it in:briefest phrase, “ Had a sharp squirmish to-day.” There was Judge Ephraim Wood, a member of the Committee of Corre- spondence all through the Revolution, a man who owed very little to education or opportuni- ties, and very much to his own high principle and sound sense, and who remained to a great old age a person of influence. Nor can any enumeration of the striking men of that period omit Dr. Ripley. For sixty-three years he stood in his place, a true minister of the old school. He had a vigorous will, was often stiff and un- yielding, was always something of an autocrat, but he was steadily on the side of the right and not of the wrong, ever desiring higher intelli- gence, purer manners, and nobler life. These, and others scarcely less notable, we find on the list of our Social Circle at its first formation. And to them very largely was committed the moulding of town life, as it emerged from the strifes of war and came under the new law of freedom, SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 35 I was glad, too, to see on these walls repre- sentatives of what may be called the second generation of the Social Circle. And a notable generation it was. Old Dr. Isaac Hurd, Jona- than Fay, Samuel Hoar, Nathan Brooks, John Keyes, Dr. Abiel Heywood, the two Mr. Shat- tucks, Joseph Barrett, Esquire, Dr. Josiah Bart- lett, — these, certainly, were prominent figures in the gatherings of the Circle between 1800 and 1832. Were they not equally prominent figures in the life and activity of the town? Rich as our annals have been the last fifty years in good and great names, it appears to me that we never had a brighter galaxy of talent, a finer array of strong and useful men, than in the very period we are considering. What varied ability was displayed on all kinds of fields! There were physicians of the old school, of whom Dr. Hurd was an excel- lent representative; good lawyers like Justice Fay, Mr. Hoar, Mr. Brooks, Judge Heald, and many others ; vigorous political leaders like Mr. Keyes, whose influence was felt all over the county ; sagacious town officers like Dr. Abiel Heywood, who seemed himself to be the balance wheel in our village life; shrewd business men, and successful, from whom we may single out the late Colonel Shattuck; enterprising farmers, suchas ’Squire Joseph Barrett, who, with his great farm, and: his dozen yoke of oxen, and his own stalwart:form and striking mental charac- 36 CENTENATAL OF THE teristics, filled perhaps as large a space as any of his contemporaries. That generation could even boast of an historian, in the person of Lemuel Shattuck, himself one of the progenitors of town annalists in this country. Nor would any list be quite complete which left out the name of Dr. Josiah Bartlett. He came into the Circle in the latter half of the period, in 1820, and the remembrance of him and of his activity, both physical and mental, are so fresh that I need only to name him. These men, and many more who might be mentioned, gave to the town in the first third of the century an honorable dis- tinction and influence, and added dignity to the Circle of which they were members. At this point I pause. Those who may keep the second Centennial of the Social Circle can describe such of us as are now on the stage, or those who have recently left it, if so be they find aught worthy of preservation. But clear it is to me that, in the future as in the past, a voluntary association of gentlemen, deeply interested in the good name and useful career of the town, who meet from week to week in a free and in- formal manner, and talk frankly over the matters which most concern the common welfare, must, in the hundred years to come, be, as it has been in the hundred years which are past, one of the simplest, best, and most vigorous forces in the life of this ancient yet youthful town. SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 37 Tue Cuarrman: “ Will Judge Brooks give us his view of the club, inherited or personal ?” Jupce Brooks: “I think, at this late hour, Mr. Chair- man, you must excuse me.” THE CHAIRMAN: “Well, I am sorry to do so. We are disappointed also in Mr. Fay Barrett’s inability, from illness, to make the contribution that he had hoped. We have one ex-member present with us that we are very happy to meet and welcome to-night (Mr. Wheildon), and I have under- stood he would ask a friend to read a few words for him.” Mr. WHEILDON: “Being, as I supposed I should be, Mr. Chairman, the only ex-member of the Social Circle present to-night, I took my pencil this afternoon, and threw together a few light words, which I have requested my friend, Mr. Smith, to read to the Circle.” THe CHAIRMAN: ‘Will Mr. Smith be so kind as to read the ‘few light words which Mr. Wheildon has thrown to- gether?’” Mr. H. F. Sir then read the following : — Mr. CuairMan, — Finding myself, as I sup- posed might be the case, the only ex-member of the Social Circle present, I have thought, per- haps, that I might be allowed a few light words on the occasion. According to my remembrance, I was a mem- ber of the Social Circle about the middle of the present century, and it is now more than a quar- ter of a century since I have attended its meet- ings. Still my memory is very fresh as regards its members at that time, and the recollection of them, especially those of my neighbors, has now been brought very vividly and very pleasantly to my mind. I shall never forget them personally, 38 CENTENNIAL OF THE nor my association with the Circle even for a few years, There was, no doubt, at the time it was formed, much need of such a society, when the popula- tion of the town was sparse, and neighbors out- side of the village some distance from each other, without anything which might be called social intercourse among them. It seems natural, there- fore, that interest in the Circle, and its gratifica- tions, should keep it alive and in good spirits, according to the Constitution, to this time, when it has reached the good old age of one hundred years. During all this time, it may be truly said, it has done much to make the prominent men of the town acquainted with each other, and at the same time has unquestionably promoted, in many important matters, the general interest of the town. It will probably be continued, with re- newed vitality, by the successive generations which are to carry on the business of this world for coming centuries. But, it is to be hoped, as the rule excluding ladies from the Circle has been broken, and the precedent established of admitting the wives or representatives of members, once in a hundred years, that after a reasonable experience of that practice, a better rule may be adopted; that of admitting them as often as once each year, per- haps at the last meeting in March, as at this time: a hundred years is altogether too long.a SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 39 time for any lady to wait, living in expectation of so great a human felicity. Having said thus much in violation of a law which Iam just now bound to observe, I must conclude with my best wishes for the society and its continued usefulness, and kind regards to the ladies whose connection with it heretofore, for a hundred years, has only been to provide suppers for its members. THE CuarRMAN: “ We have a pleasant letter from an ex- member, Dr. Jarvis, somewhat too long to read in the time that we have left, in which he expresses many good wishes and some reminiscences, and says that his interest in the club passes through two generations ; that his father was a member for forty years, and that he was the secretary for twenty-seven years himself of a similar club in Dorchester, Mass., where he now resides. “Gentlemen of the Circle, — Mr. Sanborn, in one of his verses, which I wish I could repeat with accuracy, said that our hundred years beginning with somebody (perhaps he will supply the missing name) ended with Emerson, and one of our youngest members, Dr. Emerson, we will ask to close the century to-night.” REMARKS OF DR. E. W. EMERSON. Mr. CuarirmMan, — Since the committee have done me the compliment to ask me to speak or to contribute something for the evening’s enter- tainment, not having the gift of ready speech, I have ventured to put in writing what, to the as- tonishment of my former schoolmaster, Mr. San- born, might be called a mathematical paper. 40 CENTENNIAL OF THE Irreverent persons speak of physicians who use the stronger drugs as if their rule of practice were, “ When in doubt, narcotize your patient.” If you run this risk at my hands, you must charge it to your Committee of Arrangements. The primary effect of narcotics is usually stimu- lating ; so watch lest you feel exhilarated if you would avoid subsequent danger. While we wish for many happy returns of this hundredth birthday of the club (at which recur- ring feasts circumstances quite beyond our own control will prevent most of us from being pres- ent), we naturally turn back to the legends of its first birthday. Some facts and seemingly some fictions with regard to its formation have been unearthed by successive excavating parties. I have been try- ing to learn more broadly how all circles, hence this one, originate. From the old Alexandrian geometer, Euclid, who probably gathered much that he gives us from the wisdom of remoter antiquity, we learn that if a radius be revolved round a given point a circle will be generated. The founders of ours, then, clearly had to choose their central point and then hunt up their radius. Every one of them had in each fore-arm a bone of that name, but we must believe that the rapid whirling of the arms of the members would have rather re- sulted in a prize-ring than in a loving and dur- able Circle like our own. SOCIAL' CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 4I What then is a geometer’s Radius? It is a Latin word ; its English is Ray. What rays, be- yond those of the sun, moon, and stars, were to be had in 1782? Perhaps a clear ray of high hope and faith shone through the dark-lowering cloud of war. With this radiating beam and the flag-staff on the hill over the town for a centre they surely had good material to work out their circle with- Perhaps they chose their members from each spot this bright ray lighted, as it swept round Concord, from the farms in the forest clearings, the shops by the mill pond, the squire’s and doc- tor’s offices, the Old Manse by the river. Just. how these strong men swung this radius round the central point we do not know. All heroic foundations are soon clothed with mists. That they did something of the sort we may believe, as we learn that the club originated in the Com- mittee of Safety. What else can we learn of circles in general ? Weare told that they are plane figures. Such a one would be excellently adapted then to this part of Middlesex: but we hope that all the members are not bound to be plain figures. Worcester, in his dictionary, gives as the eighth definition of czvcle, “a class of people, a com- pany, a society,” and, to illustrate the correct use of the word in this sense, quotes this phrase from Addison, “a circle of beauties.” 42 CENTENNIAL OF THE Worcester does not allude to this club by name, though he mentions many remarkable kinds of circle, as, for instance, the “ Circle of II- lumination.” This, alas! is not ours, for he de- fines it as “an zmaginary circle which separates the illuminated from the dark hemisphere of the earth,” — presumably between us and China at this time. He also tells of two very extraordi- nary varieties, namely, “circles of perpetual ap- parition,” and those of “ perpetual occultation,” and says they are so called because the stars included within the former never set, and within the latter never rise. Does he mean from table? This study has a great charm. Let us remem- ber, by the way, that the circle in the Middle Ages was a mighty spell in the hands of the en- chanter, — used to keep the devil ow, but also hard for him to get out of, if he once got in. Let us beware that the indiscriminate revival of Medizvalism now fashionable lead us not into experiments tending towards raising him. A leading novelist says that a certain personage under ground was mightily amused when he heard a man overhead cry, “Courage / mon amt ; le diable est mort /” But, woe is me! it stands recorded in the club book that in its first beginnings the bond was well-nigh snapped asunder forever by Dr. Eze- kiel Brown, his garrulity; and, though the pro- fession have to thank the Rev. Mr. Reynolds for SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 43 a sturdy defense of that physician’s character, with charity at once honorable to and character- istic of his biographer, let Dr. Brown’s ill-repute and admission in writing that the “Social So- ciety flourished much while he was closely con- fined prisoner,” be a warning to the present med- ical members. To conclude then; in ancient times the circle is said to have symbolized completeness and eter- nity: happy omen for the club! Tue CuarrmMan: ‘I will explain for the benefit of the ladies present (the members need no such information, and the ladies, perhaps, may be aware that the gentlemen are evasive creatures), that the rule of the club confining the en- tertainment to cider, flip, grog, and toddy, has been some- what left out of practice, I may say, in recent times, by this device ; that the Constitution of the club provides that its sessions shall continue from six to nine o’clock, and nothing but cider, flip, grog, or toddy is ever introduced into the meetings of the club between six and nine. When the hour of nine arrives, as the session of the club according to the Constitution is at an end, any little refreshments which may be met by the members as they rise to depart are welcome, and not unconstitutional. And I believe that, as we have concluded our Centennial ceremonies with that exception, some such fortune may await all the company present on this occasion. The meeting of the Social Circle is ended.” The Circle and their guests then proceeded to the dining-room and spent a pleasant hour at the supper table, loaded with a bounteous re- past. 44 CENTENNIAL OF THE LETTER OF DR. EDWARD JARVIS. DorcuHeEsTER, Mass., March 16, 1882. Henry J. Hosmer, Esq., Chairman of the Committee of the Social Circle, Concord, Mass. My pear Sir, — Your courteous invitation to attend the Centennial Anniversary of your association on Tuesday, the 21st instant, reached me this morning. I am very grateful to the gentlemen of the club for this pleasant notice, and I would accept in person if it were pos- sible for me to do so. But necessity compels me to remain at home, yet my heart and my sympathy will be with you on that occasion. I have very pleasant memories of the meetings of that society, running back two generations. My father was a member at my earliest recollection. When I was living in Louisville, Kentucky, he wrote me, “I have resigned my place in the club, and I have done it with a clear conscience, for I have attended its meetings for forty years.” My brother Francis was a member, and I was also a member from 1832 to 1837, during my last residence in Concord. We all enjoyed the meetings, mentally and socially, and they were well attended. The club had great influence in the public affairs of the town. Almost every question or project relating to town business was first started at some of the meetings and discussed in all its bearings, and if approved, and came up in town meeting, there, as it had been accepted by so large a portion of the leading minds of the town, its adoption was a foregone conclusion. Our entertainments were very simple: we had apples, — russets almost always, few had any other, — wine, and cider. . . « When I went to Louisville I found a similar club, who at once invited me to join them. They aimed at more lit- erary and intellectual work, and had more elaborate and lux- urious suppers. When I came here in 1843, I felt the want é SOCIAL CIRCLE IN CONCORD. 45 of such association, and proposed to form one. This was accepted. It was limited to twelve members, because it was proposed to have a regular supper at the beginning of the evening, to take the place of the home meal. After this a discussion follows upon some topic previously agreed upon. Our meetings are often full ; it is rare that any association is attended by so large a proportion of its members. I was secretary for twenty-seven years. At the end of thirty years we had a meeting at which Deacon Clapp, our historian, read a history of the club, which was afterwards printed. I trust you in Concord will do the same. The history of the hun- dred years will be a very interesting book. Again thanking you and your associates for their pleasant remembrance and invitation, and hoping your club will have another century of prosperity, I am, very respectfully yours, Epwarp Jarvis. APPENDIX. CONSTITUTION. To strengthen the social affections, and disseminate use- ful communications among its members, we, whose names are hereunto subjoined, do hereby agree to form ourselves into a society by the name of THE SocraL CircLe In Con- CORD, and to adopt the following Rules and Regulations, namely : — 1. The number of the Society shall not exceed twenty- five. 2. Persons desirous of admission into the Society shall make application to the secretary, and he shall propose the first applicant on the same evening, or at the next meeting of the Society after a vacancy is determined, and the person so proposed for admission shall be balloted for at the first future meeting, when not less than thirteen members are present. 3. No person shall be admitted as a member against whose admission two ballots appear. 4. The Society shall meet on Tuesday evenings from the first of October to the last of March, inclusively, at such place as the majority of the Society shall determine, the meetings to begin at six and end at nine o’clock Pp. m. 5- To promote the design of this institution each member, when speaking, shall address himself to the chairman of the Society. 6. The same rule shall be observed in determining vacan- cies as in the admission of members, both as it respects the number of members present, and the number voting in the affirmative, except in cases of death. 4 50 APPENDIX. 4. The refreshment for the Society shall be moderate, consisting of only cyder, grogg, flip, or toddy, or either of them, as the members may desire. 8. The expense of the refreshment shall be equally as- sessed on the members, to be paid at such times and in such manner as the Society may determine. g. There shall be a secretary chosen the first Tuesday evening in January annually, whose duty shall be to record the names and proceedings of the Society from time to time in a book deposited with him for that purpose. 10. No alteration shall be made in the foregoing rules and regulations, unless as many members are present, and consent thereto, as are required for the admission of mem- bers. AMENDMENTS. January 4, 1831. Voted, that the Society will in future dispense with the use of ardent spirits as refreshment at their meetings. November 23, 1869. Voted, that the list of applicants for admission heretofore kept by the secretary be abolished, and that in the balloting for candidates, any citizen of the town may be voted for, a majority of those present and vot- ing to be necessary to a selection of a candidate. LIST OF MEMBERS. THE list of members previous to 1795 was prepared and inserted in the book of records by Dr. Joseph Hunt, the secretary, in 1804, and has since been revised by a later secretary, after a more careful examination of the 1ecord itself. From this list it appears probable that not more than twenty members composed the Circle before 1798, when it was filled up to the limit of twenty-five. ‘The date of admission to and leaving the Circle is given so far as can be ascertained. Those not living are marked *. Those liv- ing, not now members, ft. Those whose sons were mem- bers, f. Those reélected, §. Joined. Members. Cause and Date of Withdrawal. 1782. *HumpHrey Barrett . . . Resigned . 1822 1782. *{SamueL BarTLeTT . . . ~. Moved away 1795 1782. *Davip Brown. . . . . . Died. . . 1802 1782, *EzexieL Brown . . . . . Left . . . 1785 1782. JosepH BROWN .... . — — 1782. *{REUBEN BRuwN . . . . . Died. . . 1832 1782. *EmersON CocGSwELL. . . . Died. . . 1808 1782. *JoNATHAN Fay. . . . . . Died. . . 1811 1782. *tJonas Heywoop . . . . . Died. . . 1808 1782. *Jos—epH HosmMeR . . . . . Resigned . 1802 1782. *tTHomMas HupparD . . . . Resigned . 1823 1782. “*JosepH Hunt. . .. . . Died. . . 1812 1782. ‘*Duncan INGRAHAM . . . . Moved away 1795 1782. *ELNATHAN Jones. . . . . Died... 1793 1782, *EpHRaim Jones . . . . . Moved away 1805 1782. *SAMUEL Jones. . . . . . Died. . . 1812 1782. *Jonas Leg. . . -. . . . Died. . . 1819 1782, *PeTER WHEELER. . . . . Died. . 1813 1782. *JoHN Wuite . . . . . . Resigned . 1827 1782. *Epuraim.Woop . . . . . Resigned . 1802 52 1785. 1786. 1786. 1789. 1795: 1795+ 1798. 1798. 1798. 1798. 1798. 1801. 1802. 1802. 1802. 1804. 1804. 1804. 1805. 1805. 1805. 1808. 1808. 1809. 1809. 1812. 1812. 1813. 1813. 1814. 1815. 1815. 1816. 1818. 1819. 1819. APPENDIX. *tEzra RIPLEY *JOHN VOSE . *JoHN RICHARDSON *tIsaac Hurp *REUBEN HuNT. *ABEL BARRETT. *WILLIAM PARKMAN *STEPHEN Woop *{FRANCIS JARVIS *JaMes TEMPLE. *WILLIAM JONES *TILLY MERRICK *THomas HEALD *EPHRAIM Wiese - *OLIVER CROMWELL WYMAN *JoHN LEIGHTON ‘TUTTLE *CHARLES HAMMOND . *REUBEN BRYANT . *JoHN LyNDE PRESCOTT. *JONATHAN WHEELOCK *NaTHAN Woop *{JosePH BARRETT . *JostaH Davis : *JONATHAN HUBBARD Davis *Isaac Hurp, Jr. . *NATHANIEL MONROE *MosEs PRICHARD . *Witt1AM Herywoop . *tNATHAN BARRETT. *Jonas HrEywoop . *DANIEL SHATTUCK *BENJAMIN Dixon BARTLETT . *JAMES HAMILTON . *{WILLIAM MONROE *SAMUEL BUTTRICK *JoHn ADAMS . Honorary . 1787 . Resigned . 1832 . Moved away 1804 . Resigned . 1831 . Died . . 1816 . Died . . 1803 . Resigned . 1825 . Died . . 1820 . Resigned . 1837 . Moved away 1801 . Moved away 1802 . Resigned . Moved away 1813 . Resigned . Moved away 1804 . Died . . Moved away 1806 . Moved away 1805 . Moved away 1819 . Moved away 1821 . 1821 . 1824 - 1813 . Died . . 1810 . Died . . 1849 . Moved away 1839 . Died. . 1815 . Died . . 1828 . Moved away 1817 . Resigned . 1864 . Resigned. 1828 . Died . . 1829 . Resigned. 1823 . Died . . 1867 Moved away 1818 . Moved away 1819 . Resigned . Died . . Moved away 1831 . 1851 . 1820 1819. 1819. 182T, 1821. 1821. 1822. 1822. 1823. 1823. 1824. 1825. 1827. 1828. 1828. 1829. 1831. 1831. 1832. 1832. 1832. 1832. 1832. 1832. 1836, 1837. 1839. 1839. 1839. 1839. 1841. 1843. 1844. 1846. 1846. 1847. 1847. LIST OF MEMBERS. *{Joun KeEveEs *ReEUBEN Brown, Jr.. *JostaH BARTLETT . *Joun Stacy *Cyrus HuBBARD . *{ELiaH Woop . *INATHAN BROOKS . *SAMUEL Burr . *{Cyrus HosMER *LEMUEL SHATTUCK *tApieEL HEywoop . *NEHEMIAH BALL . *EPHRAIM MERRIAM *DuDLEY SMITH *WILLIAM WHITING *NATHAN BARRETT *tPuingas How. *Hersey BRADFORD Gadi : *ABEL MOORE *Cyrus Stow *Cyrus WARREN fEpwarp JARVIS *JoHN MILTON CHENEY . {WILLIAM SHEPHERD. . ». *ALVAN PRATT . *FRANCIS JARVIS — *Davip LorINnG . tRALPH WaLpDO Honstin *ALBERT Hopart NELSON . *GEORGE MINOTT BARRETT. REUBEN NATHANIEL RICE. “*BARZILLAI FROST . Joun SHEPARD KeEvEs . *SAMUEL RIPLEY LoRENzO EATON . . Died. . Moved away 1848 a . Died . . 1844 . Resigned . 1848 . Died . . 1878 . Resigned . 1848 . Resigned . 1851 . Died .. . 1861 . Died . . 1863 . Died . . 1832 . Moved away 1832 . Moved away 1832 . Died . . 1839 . Died . . 1860 . Died . . 1843 . Moved away 1832 . Died . . 1862 . Died . . 1868 . Died. . 1852 Died . . 1836 . Died. . 1848 ; Besieced . 1871 . Died . . 1866 . Moved away 1837 . Died . . 1869 . Moved away 1839 . Resigned . 1846 . Resigned . 1847 - Moved away 1857 . Moved away 1841 EBENEZER Rockwoop Hoar . . Resigned . Moved away 1846 . Moved away 1857 . 1866 . 1847 54 1848. 1848. 1848. 1848. 1849. 1851. 1851. 1851. 1852. 1853. 1854. 1856. 1856. 1857. 1857. 1857. 1860. 1860. 1861. 1862. 1864. 1864. 1866. 1866. 1867. 1868. 1868. 1869. 1870. 1871. 1873. 1873. 1874. 1875. 1875. 1878. APPENDIX. *tSamMuEL Hoar. . . . Died. . . 1856 *FRANCIS RICHARD Gasieas . Died. . . 1853 +WitLiaM WILDER WHIELDON . Resigned. 1856 *Simon Brown. . . . . ~« Died. . . 1873 {Tristram Barnarp Mackey. Resigned . 1851 §LorENzo EaTon . oe % JonaTHAN Fay Barretr . . Resigned . 1860 *Francis Monroe. . . . . Resigned . 1854 EvijanH Woop, JR. *SAMUEL GREENE WHEELER . Moved away 1856 EPHRAIM WALES BULL . *ApoLtpuHus Bates. . . . . Died. . . 1874 SAMUEL STAPLES . NaTHAN BROOKS STow fBarzittar Nicxerson Hupson Moved away 1875 FRANKLIN BENJAMIN SANBORN Moved away 1868 GRINDALL REYNOLDS RicHARD BARRETT ~ 8 *ADDISON Grant Fay . . . Died. . . 1873 Jutius MIcHAEL SMITH GrEorRGE MERRICK BROOKS . GEORGE Hrywoop : *JOHN FREDERICK SKINNER . Died. . . 1870 Epwarp CARVER DAMON . Henry FRANGIS SMITH . GEORGE KeryES Henry JosEPH Hossenn GrEorGE Puingeas How. §REUBEN NATHANIEL RICE. tEDwarp THomas HORNBLOWER Moved away 1874 §JonaTHAN Fay BARRETT . §FRANKLIN BENJAMIN SANBORN. Henry Martin Grout Epwarp WaLpo EMERSON Henry JoEL WaLcorr . James Barretr Woop . REPORT OF COMMITTEE. i THE committee chosen the first of January last (1828) to collect facts relating to the first formation and history of the Social Circle, and to consider the propriety of altering the Constitution, beg leave respectfully to make the following report :— On examination of the records of the Circle, it appears that there is none of its proceedings recorded previous to 1795- A list of the names of those who were supposed to have been members previous to that date was collected about 1804, and transcribed into our records by the present secretary (J. Hunt). In conversation with the oldest mem- bers now living, we have uniformly been informed that the Circle was organized a long time before 1795 ; that after it had been in existence several years, was broken up by Dr. Ezekiel Brown ; that it was reorganized and continued har- moniously several years, till some of the members introduced the practice of giving suppers when they met at their houses ; that this gave offense and again broke it up, and that it was soon after again reorganized by adopting the Constitution under which it has since been continued. After becoming acquainted with these facts, your commit- tee endeavored to ascertain the dates of the first and two subsequent organizations, and also the dates of the suspen- sions. In doing this we obtained some history of Dr. Brown, the notorious disturber of the first society. In a postscript of a letter dated Clinton (Me.), October 28, 1822, addressed to Thaddeus Blood, Esq., of this town, Dr. Brown observed : ‘There was a society in Concord called the Social Society, which flourished very much while I was close confined a prisoner. I wish to be informed whether that society is still kept up ; if so, whether they increase in numbers or not. I should be glad to know if there be such a man living as 5 6 APPENDIX. Frederick William Gyer, of the Kingdom of Great Britain, son-in-law to Duncan Ingraham, of Concord, who was the first founder of mischief in Concord.” Mr. Blood states that several years before the Revolution, Dr. Brown kept store where Deacon Jarvis’s bakehouse now stands. About 1770 he bought the house now owned by Mr. Tolman, where he ‘removed his store. In 1774 he failed, was taken for debt by Captain Ingraham, agent for Mr. Geyer, then an eminent merchant in Boston, and imprisoned in~ Boston, where he remained till the British troops evacuated the town, when he was liberated. During his confinement he acquired some little knowledge of physic and surgery. Mr. Reuben Brown was his bondsman. In 1777 he enlisted into the army as a surgeon, and continued in the Continental service till about 1780, when he returned. When peace took place in 1783, Mr. Geyer, who had resided in England during the war (being un- friendly to the American interests), returned, and again com- menced business in Boston. His claim on Dr. Brown was again demanded, and, on his refusal to pay in anything but government securities, was again imprisoned by Captain In- graham. We find, on examination of the jail records, now in the hands of Captain Abel Moore, that this commitment took place at the old jail in this town, May 30, 1787, ‘for a debt on execution from the Supreme Judicial Court.” From another record in the Register it appears that he was again committed May 8, 1788, by virtue of an advertisement for breaking jail, when committed for debt, and not finding se- curities for his appearance. He was removed to Cambridge, July 7, 1788, and discharged June 27, 1789, by order of the creditor. Mr. Geyer became possessor of the Tolman house he formerly owned, and Dr. Brown soon after went to Maine.? 1 The report in relation to Dr. Brown is very different from the ac- count in Mr. Reynolds’s complete and carefully written memoir. It is to be noted that the postscript to the letter is merely an incidental remark, and the statement made therein “that it flourished very much while I was close confined a. prisoner” is one of which he could have no per- REPORT OF COMMITTEE. 57 - From these facts there is no doubt the Circle flourished very much in 1787 and 1788, the time of imprisonment to which Dr. Brown probably alludes. Mr. Vose states that he joined the Circle in 1786, about the time of its reorganization, and that Dr. Brown never belonged to it afterwards. This taken in connection with the foregoing facts make it certain that the first society to which he belonged existed prior to 1786. Mr. Reuben Brown, the only member of the first society now living, Mr. John Vose, and others, state that there was a society, similar to the present, formed soon after the com- mencement of the Revolutionary War.! This is in accord- sonal knowledge, as his close confinement was in 1788 and 1789, at Cam- bridge jail, for when confined in Concord in 1787 he probably had the “liberty of the yard,” as the advertisement ‘for breaking jail and not finding securities for his appearance’ would imply. This liberty would then have enabled him to live at home and be about the centre of the village. He was not a member after 1786, according to Mr. Vose, and how long he was a member of the Circle is a question. The report says he joined about 1780, but the memoir makes him a surgeon in the army that year, and there is no evidence but this report that he returned to Concord till the war ended in 1781 or 1782. Even if back in 1781, he might not have been chosen for some time, and the “‘ refusal of the other members to attend,” that ‘after a few years” broke up the society, be- cause he desired ‘‘to do all the talking himself,” did not leave but a very short interval between the first and second organizations. 1 Substitute the “close” for the ‘‘commencement” of the Revolu- tion, as the date of the beginning of the Circle, and the statements of Deacon Vose and Lieutenant Brown would agree with the traditions, the probabilities, and the curious relic of a record on the cover of the record book printed on red leather in gilt letters of old-fashioned type. SOCIAL CIRCLE, CONCORD, 1782. It will be noticed that Mr. Vose was not a member before 1786, and how long before that date Lieutenant Brown joined does not appear. Both were talking of what happened fifty years previous, when their memories of dates and occurrences that they were not personally connected with might easily vary a few years from the truth. 58 APPENDIX. ance with various other facts which have come to our knowledge.’ From all the evidence your committee have been able to collect, they have been enabled to fix with considerable cer- tainty the date of the first organization of the Social Circle, then called the Social Society, about the year 1777.” It might have been somewhat earlier, but there is no positive evidence of it. Soon after the commencement of the Revolutionary War, there came into this town to live, from Boston, Samuel Bart- lett, Captain Joseph Brown, and Lieutenant Emerson Cogs- well, all of whom were men of respectability, intelligence, and social habits. They, in connection with Jonas Hey- 1 The “other facts” that the report refers to without mentioning, un- less it be those contained in the next paragraph, may be like the “ facts”’ about Dr. Brown, mere loose statements, and throw no light on the date, but might, if stated in full, have been more to the purpose. 2 For this date there seems to be no authority given by the committee, and the reasoning which led to it is apparent in the following portion of the report. : 8 The coming to Concord of Samuel Bartlett, Emerson Cogswell, and Captain Joseph Brown soon after the commencement of the Revolution, seems to be the basis of the committee for fixing that date as the begin- ning of the Social Circle. It is worth considering if even these three men would have been such an addition to a town containing, as Concord did, so many much more eminent men, as to lead to’ the formation of such an organization. The first year of the war brought Harvard College bodily to Concord, president, professors, and students, and it may be wondered that the committee did not take this fact for the origin of the Circle. But while the war was going on, taxing all men’s thoughts, money, and services, committees of safety and correspondence, to none of which neither of the three named belonged, were meeting weekly, and out of these meetings Shattuck, in his history and uniform tradition, says the Circle originated. ‘These meetings were kept up till the war ended by the surrender of Cornwallis in 1781. Then as to these three men whose coming makes the Social Society or Circle start into existence, according to the report. Samuel Bartlett was but twenty-four years old when he came in 1776, began keeping a small store, in which he did not succeed, and though ten years later he had become more known and much considered by his neighbors, was REPORT OF COMMITTEE. 59 wood, Esq., Judge Wood, Captain David Brown, and other citizens, were some of the first who composed the society. Others were admitted at different times. About 1780 Dr. Brown joined, but from his excessive desire to do all the talking himself, the members became dissatisfied, and after afew years, by their neglecting to attend, the society was broken up. This took place about 1784 or 1785. In relation to its second reorganization, your committee have consulted the Rev. Dr. Ripley, who was one of its first members, and have received from him in writing the follow- ing account. It was then called the Social Club, and its ob- jects seemed to have been somewhat more various than under its present organization. “T believe,” says Dr. Ripley, “it commenced as early as 1785 or 1786. It originated with Samuel Bartlett, Esq., late rather young in 1777 to have got up a social institution. Lieutenant Emerson Cogswell, whose age cannot be ascertained, and who had one child born before his marriage, according to his grandson’s memoir, was here keeping the old Wright Tavern in 1777, had been chosen second lieutenant of a company of militia that served at Cambridge in 1776, and to the same rank in another company, in 1778, that served in Rhode Island. He, with these absences and occupations, would seem less likely than Samuel Bartlett for a founder of this society. Captain Joseph Brown is a myth that even Mr. Reynolds’s keen search can find no trace of in history, town record, or tradition, unless he is the “one Brown,” for whom Lieutenant Cogswell was bound as surety, who fled to Western Virginia, and caused Cogswell’s failure, and useless pursuit for the money. Where he lived, what property he owned, what he was captain of, cannot be found out. The probability or possibility of these three founding the Social Circle of Judge Wood, Sheriff Hosmer, Squire Heywood, and others, is too remote to be established by evidence the report does not even state. 1 As to the name, Dr. Brown calls it the “ Social Society ” in his post- script, written thirty years subsequent to his membership, and is the only authority for that name given in the report, and he is speaking of the second organization, to which the committee give the name of “ Social Club.” Dr. Ripley says of that, ‘the club as it was still called,” as it generally is now in conversation, and would not to a careful reader be thought to imply that its real name was changed. 60 APPENDIX. Register of Deeds in this county, and the minister of Con- cord; the former gentleman first proposed the subject for consideration to the latter. At the first meeting, when the plan was farther examined and matured, there were present, Messrs. E, Ripley, Samuel Bartlett, and Emerson Cogswell. Other citizens were soon informed of the plan and invited to join. At the second meeting, it is believed, besides the persons above named, Deacon John White, Dr. Joseph Hunt, Jonathan Fay, Esq., Dr. Isaac Hurd,? Mr. Reuben Brown, and Mr. John Vose, were present. Additions to the number were soon made, but in what order I cannot now ascertain. After the lapse of a few years, the club, as it was still called, became regular and apparently useful. The minister was excused from regular attendance at the meetings, and re- ceived a general invitation to meet with them whenever it should suit his convenience and choice, and was considered an honorary member. The objects of the club were substan- tially as follows, namely: To provide a substitute for the supposed needfulness of collecting at taverns to learn the news of the day, and thereby to prevent the practice of tavern haunting, and the temptation to needless expense and inju- rious drinking; to cherish social affections and draw closer the bonds of friendship among neighbors and fellow-citizens ; to elevate the tone and improve the character of social inter- course ; to acquire, in an easy and respectable manner, the knowledge of the news and interesting events of a civil, po- litical, and religious nature, and of business in general, by mutually communicating the information possessed by each individual member ; to converse freely on subjects deemed interesting, and specially such as were likely and expected to come before the town, that by such previous examination 1 Dr. Hurd did not live in Concord till 1789. 2 As to the objects. The doctor must not be understood as defining its plan and purpose (especially in having a tavern keeper form a club to break up “ tavern haunting” and “needless expense,” or “ indirectly promoting temperance” by taking drinks), but rather repeating his ser- mons on social duties and obligations. REPORT OF COMMITTEE. 61 of the subject their minds might be ripened and better pre- pared for a more public discussion and enlightened decision ; and to increase, by a friendly and mutual exchange of senti- ments, the general stock of knowledge, virtue, harmony, and happiness. “The rules of the club were few and simple. I do not recollect the present Constitution ; it appears to be in the handwriting of Dr. Hunt ; neither do I recollect that a sec- retary was chosen. The chairman, or moderator, was the man at whose house we met. The promotion of temperance being indirectly an object in view, it was agreed that we would be frugal, and have no refreshment except a little drink, once handed round, of such kind as should be pre- ferred, Deviations from the original design and this simple method proved injurious, and broke up the club, as I was informed. How long this interruption lasted I cannot say, and I had no hand in its resuscitation ; but.I am glad it has been restored to life and operation, and am still of opinion that the Circle, well regulated and attended by respectable gentlemen of different professions and occupations, may be continued both pleasant and useful.” The members who gave expensive refreshments, as inti- mated in the above statement of Dr. Ripley, were Captain Ingraham and Captain Elnathan Jones. They did not pro- vide suppers but a few evenings. The innovation was offen- sive to the club generally, and was the cause of its being broken up, which took place about 1792 or 1793.1. During this period of its existence there was no regular plan in rela- tion to the place of meeting ; at every meeting it was agreed where it should meet next. Whether any records were kept 1 As the club was existing in 1792, “who meet once a week at each other’s houses,” according to William Jones’s account of Concord, printed in the first volume of the Massachusetts Historical Collections, the breaking up “by giving suppers a few evenings” could not have hap- pened till the winter of 1792-93 or 1793-94, and as the present Consti- tution bears date of 1794 this interruption must have been very short, perhaps not exceeding a single season. 62 APPENDIX. we have been unable to ascertain. Mr. Vose is of opinion that none were kept previous to 1795. One of your com- mittee addressed a letter to the Misses Bartlett, of Cam- bridge, daughters of the late Samuel Bartlett, Esq., with a view of ascertaining whether their father left any papers re- lating to the club, but they have as yet been unable to find any. In 1795 it was organized in its present form, under the name of the Social Circle, and for about six years afterwards met at Mr. Vose’s constantly, who provided for their only refreshment “flip and toddy,” according to the Constitution, and received for his compensation 5s. 3¢. each evening. No fruit or other refreshments were used. About 1802 the Cir- cle began to meet at the members’ houses in rotation, and it still continues the practice.* It will be apparent from the foregoing statements that the reason of the seventh article of our Constitution was to guard against any difficulty which might arise from the intro- duction of immoderate or expensive refreshments. Your committee are of opinion that no alteration be made in our Constitution, but would recommend that all our refresh- ments should be moderate. They would, however, recom- mend that the teachers of our grammar school and academy for the time being be ex offcit’s honorary members. All of which is respectfully submitted. LEMUEL SHATTUCK, FRANCIS JARVIS, ConcorD, February 26, 1828. ; Committee. 1 The conclusion that a careful consideration of the matter inevitably reaches is that the Circle orignated in the Committee of Safety after the reason for their meetings had ceased in 1782; that by that date the three “so-called founders” had become known and recognized in the town sufficiently to have been chosen members of the Circle; that the date on the cover of the record book is the true one, and was saved from some older book of records that were destroyed or never kept, and was transferred to this book as its appropriate place ; that its real name has always been the same as now, Social Circle ; and that this scrap of old gilt letter is more to be relied on for name and date than the “ say so’s ”” of the committee’s report. — Ep. MEMOIRS. MEMOIR OF HUMPHREY BARRETT. BY NATHAN BROOKS, HuMPHREY BarRETT was born in Concord, May 23, A. D. 1752. Hewas a descendant from Humphrey Barrett, who came from England about the year 1639, aged about thirty- one years, and settled upon the farm now owned and occu- pied by Abel B. Heywood. In 1640 he built a dwelling- house upon the farm, nearly opposite the present dwelling. Some of the boards of the first house compose part of the house now standing on the farm, He died November 7, 1662, leaving seven children. The eldest, Thomas, was drowned in Concord River. The second, Humphrey, set- tled on the farm with his father, and July 17, 1661, married Elizabeth Paine. He died January 3, 1716, leaving several daughters and two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. Benjamin, who was born May 3, 1681, was the ancestor of Colonel James Barrett, and that branch of the family. Joseph, born January 31, 1679, married Lydia Minot, and settled on the farm with his father. He died April 4, 1763, aged eighty- five years, leaving eight children, Humphrey, the fifth child, the father of the subject of this notice, was born August 28, 1715, and settled on the farm with his father, and died in 1783, leaving two sons and six daughters. Humphrey Bar- rett, the subject of this notice, owned and occupied the same farm which had been occupied by his fathers since 1640, he being the fifth generation. He was a farmer by profession. Although never a hard worker himself, he managed his farm with great prudence and economy. He prided himself on having all the work of the farm performed not only in due order and with great faithfulness, but all completed in due 64 MEMOIR. season. He generally had his plowing, planting, haying, and harvesting done and finished earlier than his neighbors. He was one of those who have found farming a good and profit- able business. He was contented and satisfied with his farm, and never solicited any public office or trust. He was as- sessor of taxes in 1783, and town treasurer from 1792 to 1795. He was a member of the Circle from 1782 to 1822. Some persons slightly acquainted with him in the latter part of his life judged him to be unsocial, cold, and indifferent, but those most acquainted with him knew him to be pre- cisely the reverse. He was fond of social life, warm-hearted, and of deep and tender feeling. Few persons sympathized more fully with their neighbors, both in their joys and sor- rows. The following acts of his life make apparent some of these traits of his character : — A negro by the name of Cesar Robbins, who lived in a house where Peter Hutchinson now lives, had been in the habit of getting all the wood for his family use for many years from Mr. Barrett’s wood-lot, near by him; this was done with the knowledge and with the implied if not the express consent of Mr. Barrett. Mr. Barrett usually got the wood for his own use from another part of his farm. On one occasion he thought he would get his wood from the lot by Ceesar’s. He accordingly sent two men, with two teams, with directions to cut only hard wood. The men had been gone but a few hours before Caesar came to Mr. Barrett’s house, his face covered with perspiration and in great agita- tion, and says, “ Master Barrett, I have come to let you know that a parcel of men and teams have broke into our wood- lot, and are making terrible destruction of the very best trees, and unless we do something immediately I shall be ruined.” Mr, Barrett had no heart to resist this appeal of Cesar’s. He told him not to be alarmed, for he would see that he was not hurt, and would put the matter right. Mr. Barrett wrote an order to his men to cut no more wood, but come directly home with their teams, and sent the order by Caesar. HUMPHREY BARRETT. 65 Another act. A young man, who had served Mr. Barrett faithfully for many years, expressed a wish to purchase a farm and settle in life. Mr. Barrett doubted the policy and expediency of his purchasing a farm, but finding him bent upon it, he immediately entered cordially into his project, and lent him every aid in his power; and when the pur- chase-money for the farm exceeded the sum due the young man for his wages by some hundreds of dollars, Mr. Bar- rett paid the whole, giving him the balance, saying he wished him to start in the world free of debt ; and about the same time made to him deeds of real estate, estimated to be worth more than $2,000, and lodged them with the writer of this notice to be delivered to the young man at the death of the maker, saying at the time that the young man was faith- ful and honest, but had no faculty to keep or use money, and he feared he would suffer unless something was laid by for him by somebody, Mr. Barrett was scrupulously conscientious and just, not in theory only, but practically ; whatever he believed to be right and just he executed to the extent of his ability, and he was equally decided and earnest in the execution whether it required the sacrifice of his own property or was like to add to it. A favorite nephew, who bore his name, and whose guar- dian he was, died under age in the year 1817, leaving a large estate, and no relatives nearer than uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts. Mr. Barrett believed that in equity the estate ought to be distributed equally between the uncle and aunt and the children of deceased aunts by right of representation, and although advised by the best legal counsel in the State that such was not the law, he still in- Sisted upon having the question carried before the Supreme Court for decision ; and when the court decided against his opinion, he carried out his own views of equity by distrib- uting the portion of the estate that fell to him according to his opinion of what the law ought to be. 5 66 MEMOIR. In settling his account as guardian of his nephew the fol- lowing facts occurred: After he had been fully advised that the estate would be distributed in a manner he thought neither equitable nor just, he applied to the writer to make out his account as guardian, furnishing the evidence as he believed of the original amount of all his receipts as such guardian. J made the account, charging him with interest at six per cent. on all sums from the time of receipt, up to the time of making the account. Mr. Barrett took the ac- count for examination, and soon returned it with directions to charge him with compound interest on all sums received by him, saying that he believed he had realized as much as that. I accordingly made the amount conform to his direc- tions. He then wished me to present the account to the party who claimed half the estate, and ask him to examine it with care and see if anything was omitted. This was done, and no material omission discovered, and no objection made. On communicating the result to Mr. Barrett, he said he had always kept all the property of his ward in a drawer appropriated for the purpose ; that he made the amount of property in the drawer greater than the balance of the account, and handing to me the contents of the drawer wished me to ascertain the precise sum to which it amounted. I found that it exceeded the balance of the account by the sum of $3,221.59. He then told me in substance, that he was quite unwilling to have so large an amount of property go where it was in danger of being distributed inequitably, and particularly as he was confident he had disclosed every source from which he had realized any property of his ward and the actual amount received, but as he knew not how it got into the drawer, and intended all the property there to go to his nephew, he should not feel right to retain it, and directed me to add it to the account, which was done. These facts show clearly, I think, not only that his love of right was stronger than his love of money, but that he would rather make any sacrifice of property than leave a doubt in his own mind whether full justice had been done others. HUMPHREY BARRETT. 67 Mr. Barrett married Rebecca Heywood, the daughter of Jonas Heywood. He died without issue March 13, 1827, aged seventy-five years. He left a will, in which he gave to the First Parish in Concord $500 for the support of the ministry. The greater part of his estate, which amounted to more than twenty thousand dollars ($24,721.54), he gave to Abel B. Heywood, who now owns and lives on the farm so long held by him and his ancestors. December, 1856. 68 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF SAMUEL BARTLETT. BY DR. JOSIAH BARTLETT. The memory of the subject.of this memoir (Samuel Bart- lett, Esq.) should be held in high estimation by the people of Concord, for he was a quiet, unobtrusive, kind-hearted, Christian gentleman, who for twenty years exerted his influ- ence for the good of all around him. More particularly should he be held in grateful remembrance by the Social Circle, for he was one of its brightest ornaments in its first organization, the father to its second and probably of its third resuscitation. He was the son of Roger Bartlett and Anna Hurd. His father was born in Brandiscombe, in the west of England, February 6, 1723. He came early to this country, was en- gaged in the merchant service as a sea captain, and for many years sailed from Boston to Bristol, England. He was re- markable for his strict integrity, temperance, and equanimity of temper, which won for him the confidence of his employ- ers, while his upright and dignified deportment commanded the love and respect of all whom he employed. He married a daughter of Benjamin and Elizabeth Hurd, of Charlestown, October 9, 1749. Samuel, their only son, was born November 17, 1752. From his youth he was sur- rounded with scenes of stirring interest. British fleets were in our harbors, British troops marched through our streets, the constant alarm, the frequent ringing of the bells to call our citizens from their homes through fear of a collision be- tween the troops and the citizens, made an impression upon his mind which was never after effaced. In early life he was desirous of following the profession SAMUEL BARTLETT. 69 of. his father, but he yielded his preferences, sacrificed his own inclination to the earnest entreaties of his mother, to remain at home with her. Failing in his first and darling ob- ject, his next design was to obtain a liberal education, and for that end he became a pupil of the famous master Tileston. Before completing his preparatory studies, his course of life was again changed. On the evening of the Boston Massacre, he, with hundreds of others, ran to King’s Street, on the cry of trouble between the citizens and soldiers. To the sudden report of fire-arms on that night close to his right ear, he attributed a deafness from which he never recovered. For this cause, and the dis- turbed state of the country, he relinquished the pursuit of his studies, and became an apprentice to Mr. Samuel Minot, an eminent goldsmith in Boston. Before he got through his time, the war of the Revolution began. Boston was in. a state of siege. The inhabitants fled for safety, and he, the sole protector of his mother, and the families of her two daughters, his father being at sea, secured a safe retreat for them at Woburn. Before leaving Boston he was married, September 19, 1776, to Mary, daughter of Isaiah Barrett,-a respectable merchant of that place. Before the close of that year he removed to Concord. Here twelve of his thirteen children were born ; here, in the old church, they were christened, where he and his wife were constant worshipers and exemplary members. Both of them early embraced Christianity, for we find on our church records that he was transferred from the North Street church in Boston to this church January 17, 1789 ; while his wife, on the 29th of March of the same year, was recom- mended from the church in Royalston. How she, a Boston lady, should have been a member of that church I cannot di- vine. I also find that they were both transferred from the church in Concord to the church in Cambridge on the 2d of May, 1811, more than fifteen years after their removal from us. I know of no member of -the church of whom the Rev. 70 MEMOIR. Dr. Ripley, who was his pastor, had a higher love and re- spect, than for Mr. Bartlett, always speaking of him as one of his bosom friends. On coming to Concord Mr. Bartlett opened a small store, vending the usual merchandise of a country trader. He was not particularly successful in this new enterprise ; the unset- tled state of the country, the great depression of business, the uncertainty of the currency, all contributed to render ex- tensive business transactions difficult, if not unsafe. I know not how long he continued a merchant, or when he returned to his old vocation as a goldsmith. But on the completion of the new jail, in 1788, he bought the old one, together with the county house, situated at the west end of the.centre bury- ing-ground, near Bigelow’s tavern; and here, in the front room of the house, he kept his shop, while His family occu- pied the other rooms. Here he plied his ae and in many families are still shown the silver spoons of hi§ manufacture. According to Shattuck’s report, in 1777, he, with Captain Joseph Brown, Lieutenant Emerson Cogswell, all of whom came from Boston early in the war of the Revolution, to- gether with Judge Wood, Jonas Heywood, and Captain David Brown, formed a society called the “ Social Society,” which was the origin of the present ‘ Social Circle.” A Dr. Brown was admitted in 1780, who soon rendered himself obnoxious to the rest by his excessive desire to do all the talking, and after a few years one by one refused to attend, and the so- ciety was broken up in 1784 or ’85. Its reorganization in 1785, under the name of the “ Social Club,” as Dr. Ripley informs me, originated with Mr. Samuel Bartlett. Its principal object was to cherish the social affections, to draw closer the bonds of friendship, to elevate the tone and improve the character of social intercourse. The entertain- ments were at first frugal ; but deviations in this respect proved injurious, and broke up the “club,” 1792 or ’93. The sinning members were Captain Duncan Ingraham and Cap- tain Elnathan Jones, who vied with each other in giving ex- SAMUEL BARTLETT. 71 pensive suppers. In 1794 it was again reorganized under its present Constitution, under the name of the “Social Circle,” and we find the name of Samuel Bartlett second on the list as elected in 1794, and removed in 1795, the year he left Concord for Cambridge. Well is it that his name should be held in high respect by our members, for to him are we in- debted again and again for its resuscitation, having been as often periled, if not destroyed, by the folly of some of its members. He was not ambitious of, nor did he receive, the highest offices in the gift of his townsmen. For years he was chosen to the humble office of sealer of weights and measures, and was often elected clerk of the market (an office now obso- lete), the duties of which I have not been able to learn. It must have been of some importance, for only our first men held the appointment. He was often on important commit- tees, as in laying out roads, making bridges, remodeling the church, and the difficult duty in relation to Dr. Ripley’s sal- ary, which became complicated from a depreciation of the currency (to what extent there was a great difference of opin- ion), which required time, caution, and conciliation to adjust amicably, and took years to accomplish. The times were dark enough in Massachusetts. Soon after the war in 1788, the whole community felt the griev- ances of the times, when in Shays’ insurrection many were induced to appeal to arms to compel the government to grant relief. Concord lamented the existing evils, but her proceedings were constitutional, conciliatory, and highly commendable. Of the delegates chosen from Concord to attend the con- vention of Middlesex County to consult upon matters of pub- lic grievance, Mr. Bartlett was one of the five, and to guard against any rash proceedings, the town instructed them to Oppose every unconstitutional measure which may be pro- posed by said convention. Several in the convention from other towns took an active part in the subsequent opposition a2 MEMOIR. to the government. The whole thing met with a stern re- buke from Concord, and the people in town meeting de- clared their utter abhorrence of such riotous conduct, and a committee (of which he was one) was raised, to prepare a circular letter to other towns in the county, invoking their cooperation in acting as mediators between the government and the opposition, and in using their utmost endeavors to calm the minds of the people. The circular was issued and did much to conciliate the people. A copy was sent to the governor and council for their approbation. It was sent in post haste by Captain Duncan Ingraham on Sunday morn- ing, the state of the times demanding the session’ on that day. The Concord proceeding was highly approved by the executive, and by their order it was sent to other counties, who took like measures to prevent the rising of the people against the government. These measures succeeded, and the insurrection was suppressed without bloodshed. The committee chosen to prepare instructions to their representative, Isaac Hubbard, in 1788, consisted of five, of whom Mr. Bartlett was one, and the paper, said to be written by him, is a remarkable performance. It shows the hand and heart of a scholar and a patriot, and a familiarity as well with the duties of a statesman as of-a citizen. I will make a single extract. In reviewing the causes which concurred to make our situation critical and distressing, he says: “ The debts contracted in the late war, public and private, the decay of public faith and credit —the want of public and private virtue — the shameful neglect of economy, frugality, and in- dustry —an unbounded fondness for foreign luxuries and man- ners — with a restless, impatient, unreasonable jealousy of our rulers, are the causes of our present unhappiness, to re- move which we conceive no effectual remedy can be applied, unless as a people we tread back the steps that have led us to our present unhappy situation.” On the 3d of November, 1794, he was voted for as candi- date for register of deeds for Middlesex County. On this s SAMUEL BARILETT. 73 election there was no chdice. The vote in Concord stood for Mr. Bartlett, fifty-six, for Dr. Abiel Heywood, thirty. An- other meeting was called on the 30th of December of the same year, which resulted in the choice of Mr. Bartlett. At this election the vote stood in Concord for him, fifty-six ; for his opponent, fifteen. Early in 1795 Mr. Bartlett removed 'to Cambridge, and for twenty-six years filled the office with fidelity, doing the duty with honor to himself and to the perfect satisfaction of the county. He died in Cambridge on the 2gth of September, 1821, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. Thus I have imperfectly given the leading events in the life of one of our most cherished members. And it is due to his memory that some memorial should be preserved, to whom all our oldest inhabitants who remember him accord the character of an honest-hearted and upright gentleman, For my part, I should feel honored if I could claim relation- ship to him, February, 1858. 74 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF DAVID BROWN. BY JOHN S,. KEYES. David Brown, the sixth on the original list, and the fourth’ on the list of the present organization, was born in Concord March 12, 1732 or ’33, according to the town records, but perhaps a year or two earlier. He was the only son and the fourth child of Ephraim and Hannah Brown, on the same authority. His father was deacon in the church from 1744 to 1788, and seems to have been a prominent man in church matters, though not conspicuous in the civil or military affairs of the town. He probably was a stern religious man, who brought up his son in accordance with the strict notions of that time. Young David was married to Abigail Munroe September 30, 1756, by Rev. Mr. Bliss. His wife was prob- ably of Concord, and, though not so recorded, may have been a daughter of Thomas Munroe, who had quite a family of girls about Brown’s age. They seem to have lived happily together for many years in the old red house on the bank of the river, near the battle-ground, and had a large family of children. Mr. Brown was an active man in town affairs before the Revolution, having served as selectman three years from 1767 to 1770, and filled several other town offices. He was a warm patriot in those troubled times before the breaking out of the war, and held in good consideration by his fellow-men. In 1774 he was appointed on a committee of inspection, to see that the articles of association of the Continental Con- gress were strictly observed, a part of whose duty it was to report to the town the names of those who failed in their duty to the country, and whom it was recommended should DAVID BROWN. 75 be treated with neglect and detestation. About this time he was chosen captain of a company of minute-men, and as he is mentioned first in the list of captains of the regiment of minute-men commanded by Colonel Abijah Pierce of Lin- coln, probably was the senior captain, and active in its for- mation. His company, there is reason to believe, was the “Alarm company,” so-called, who were directed to take care of and learn the exercise with the cannon. They, or a part of them at least, paraded on the morning of the rgth of April, 1775, at daybreak, and finding that the British troops were not then close at hand, were dismissed to meet at beat of the drum. Although no stores seem to have been deposited at his house, yet from his rank, Captain Brown must have been a busy man in the winter and early spring of that year, when great military ardor prevailed, and the companies were paraded and drilled almost every week. Rev. Mr. Emerson preached more than one sermon for their especial benefit, and directly to them drawn up in a body in the church, at these parades. At the battle of the North Bridge, after the parade in the early morning, Captain Brown’s company, having again assembled on the hill in the centre of the town, fell back on the: approach of the enemy to the high ground west of the bridge, near his resi- dence, and were drawn up in line with the other companies awaiting the onset. While thus halted he had an oppor- tunity to visit his home and make such preparations as the time admitted for the safety of his family, exposed from their proximity to great danger, as the detachment of the British troops had passed directly by his house on their way to Colonel Barrett’s. After the passing of this detachment of “ Reg’lars,” the Acton company, under Captain Isaac Da- vis, arrived on the ground, and marched down towards the bridge. Captain Brown led his company parallel with the Acton company, on the north side of the causeway, in files of two abreast, and equally in front and near to the enemy’s force posted at the bridge. There he stood at the head of 76 MEMOIR. his men on the birthplace of American liberty, and gave the order if he did not fire “the shot heard round the world.” He escaped unwounded, though one of the privates in his company bearing the same name was wounded by the first fire of the British, before Captain Davis was killed, showing the exposed position of his company. So much at least he served his country on that eventful day, and if he was not in active service.afterwards in the Revolution, it was prob- ably owing to the circumstances of his family. He was from 1776 to 1783, except one year, chosen on the committee of correspondence of the town, which is sup- posed to have led to the formation of this Circle after the war was ended. In 1779 he was chosen a delegate to the State Convention, that met here July 14th, to establish a State price current, and again in October of that-year he and Colonel Cumming were delegates to another State Con- vention, that sat seven days deliberating on the same sub- ject. In 1781 he represented the town in the Great and General Court, an honor and duty much more important than in these degenerate days. During Shays’ rebellion he was active on the side of government, and attended as a delegate a county convention in August, 1786, to consult on matters of public grievance under which people labor, instructed by the town ‘to oppose every unconstitutional measure which may be proposed.” In September of the same year, when Job Shattuck, at the head of an armed body of men, came here to prevent the court from holding its session, he seems to have been active in preventing a riot. He was a member of a committee chosen by the town, at a special meeting, to mediate between the insurgents and the authorities. This committee called a county convention, and by their timely efforts prevented violence and bloodshed. This was his last public position, and as his father died in 1788, and he had himself passed the meridian of life, he probably confined himself to the duties, cares, and enjoy- ments of private life afterwards. He died of a fever May DAVID BROWN. 77 22; 1802, at the age of seventy-two, according to the record of deaths, but sixty-nine if his birth record is correct. From the nature of his disease it may be inferred that he was a robust and active man to the end of his life, and may have kept up his attendance at the Circle, though his name does not appear in the scant records that exist of their meetings. He left a widow and a family of ten children, some of whom were partially insane and feeble minded, and were supported on the farm within my recollection. Captain Brown was a tall, fine looking man, very kind-hearted and social in his feelings, well to do in matters of property, owning the farm on which he lived, then quite valuable, and carrying it on up to the time of his death. Although a man of much con- sideration in those days, and often quoted in his sayings and doings, there are but few anecdotes of him that have survived ; one of them is so creditable to his kindness of heart that it is worthy of preservation. When Nathan Barrett, Sen’r, had, by the death of his father, the farm on the hill north of the river left him on condition that he should pay off the other heirs, fifteen in number, $100 each on their coming of age, it was consid- ered so hard an undertaking that he could find no one of his relatives in town who would become surety for him on his bond to the probate court, and all endeavored to dis- suade him from the attempt to carry out the provisions of the will. In this extremity he applied to Captain David Brown who readily signed for him, asking of Mr. Barrett only this, that if ever any of his children should want a similar favor Mr. Barrett should sign for them. This did not become necessary, as Captain Brown provided liberally for his family in his will, leaving to his widow one half the house, and a good support during life. Another anecdote is, that the brave captain never crossed alone the causeway to the ‘“ North Bridge” after dark, on his way to and from market, without singing at the top: of 78 MEMOIR. his lusty voice some good old psalm tune, that would ring out in the night, and wake many a sleeper in the village. Perhaps to lay the ghosts of the British soldiers buried there, perhaps as a requiem to their souls, — who knows ? Fanuary 18, 1853. EZERIEL BROWN. 79 MEMOIR OF EZEKIEL BROWN. BY GRINDALL REYNOLDS. Whenever I have heard Mr. Lemuel Shattuck’s sketch of the history of the Social Circle read at an annual meeting, in which Dr. Brown is spoken of as “ the notorious disturber of the first society,” and the one to whose evil influence the untimely end of that first organization is to be attributed, I have always felt a great deal of curiosity to know just who and what he really was, Yet, whenI made inquiry, I was not able to find a single person who could say with certainty that he had ever seen Dr. Brown, and hardly one who could add anything concerning his origin, character, and early or later fortunes, to the few facts contained in the sketch to which I have alluded. Perhaps a somewhat extended notice of one whose name, for good or evil, is the most marked in the early annals of the Circle, may gratify the curiosity of others beside myself. Unquestionably Dr. Brown was the lineal descendant of Thomas Brown, the first of the name, who came to Concord in 1640, and so was a Concord man by birth and family as well as by habitation: for on the 26th of January, 1646, there was born to this Thomas Brown and his wife Bridget ason, whom they named Eleazer. With this birth record the name disappears from the annals of the town. But in the next parish of Chelmsford, twenty-eight years after, on February 9, 1674, Eleazer Brown, of Concord, was married to Dinah Spaulding, of that town. Of this marriage Eleazer Brown, Jr., born in Chelmsford, April 2, 1676, was the first child. An old deed, dated January 26, 1698, says that Elea- zer Brown, Sen’r, with Dinah, his wife, formerly of Chelms- 80 MEMOIR. ford, and now of Canterbury, County of New London, Conn., to express his love for his son, Eleazer Brown, Jr., weaver, then dwelling in Concord, gives him a small tenement and six acres of meadow and twelve acres of upland, situated in Chelmsford. This second Eleazer soon after bought land in Concord, near the ancestral acres, and made his perma- nent home there. We assume, then, that Eleazer Brown, Jr., whom we shall prove to be the grandfather of Dr. Ezekiel Brown, was also the grandson of Thomas Brown, first of the name here. The career of this man, Eleazer Brown, Jr., we can trace with certainty and some minuteness. He was born, as we have seen, at Chelmsford in 1676. He was in Concord in 1698, then a young man of twenty-one, having learned from his father the trade of weaver. He was here again in 1703, having in the intervening period of five years married and had two childen away from Concord. For the next six- teen years he no doubt worked here at his trade and pros- pered. Then he began to invest his earnings in land. In 1719 he bought fifteen acres of Mary Chandler, and six of his cousin Thomas, and in small lots of others, until he Le- came the owner of a little farm of forty acres of upland and meadow, and eight acres of woodland. To this he added, in 1740, by purchase of Captains David and Robert Melvin, a little house and barn, and a two-acre lot surrounding them. From this time he is termed indifferently Eleazer Brown, weaver or yeoman. This small farm was, if we may so term it, the land departure of this branch of the Brown family in Concord. Mainly it was between what was the Groton and is now the Lowell road and Spencer brook, and forms the northern part of the Jate farm of Jacob B. Farmer. A cent- ury ago, from a few rods north of Mr. Farmer’s house to the present residence of Abel Clark, the old Groton road fell back from the present highway in a deep half circle. Back of this half circle, and running to Spencer brook, was most of the land, and probably the house and barn, though there EZEKIEL BROIWN 81 are some reasons to think that the buildings may have stood just this side the house of Thomas Davis. Here Elea- zer Brown lived until increasing years, and possibly the de- parture of his son Ezekiel from town, made a change in his affairs necessary, and in 1753 or ’54, for a small considera- tion, he conveyed one half of his lands and buildings to his son Benjamin, a cordwainer. He died on the rst of April, 1755, aged seventy-nine years. Before his death he had given his children £516 os. 9@., and left £116 ros. 1¢@. more to be divided among them, I picture this man Eleazer as a person of real substance, prudent and industrious, who laid the foundations of his children’s success. Of his twelve children two died in infancy. Three, Elea- zer, Nathan, and Samuel, moved to Rutland, Worcester Co, Benjamin, some fifteen years after his father’s death, sold out his half of the paternal acres to his nephew Jacob Brown, and moved to Swanzea, N. H. Bridget, the oldest daughter, married Benjamin Harwood, a weaver of Westboro. Mary, the second daughter, was the wife of Timothy Wesson, a car- penter of Lincoln, who died about the time of the Revolu- tion, poor and in debt. One son and one daughter of Eleazer remained in Concord. Abishai, who added to his own nume- rous acres nearly all his father’s place by purchase of the other heirs, and who died in 1764, leaving an estate of £500 or more, having already bestowed upon his two older sons property of equal value. Thrifty, like his father! Abishai’s oldest son Jacob received by gift or purchase all the northern half of his father’s farm, and with it the old family home. He was a sturdy, rugged, hard-working man, and died of old age in 1816, transmitting to his heirs more than $7,000. Neither did he fall from the ways of his fathers. His will, which states that he left thirty-seven sheets, thirty-six pillow- cases, nine table-cloths, ten bed-quilts, ten blankets, and other household goods in proportion, proves that to the gift of gathering gear he added the Jove of home comfort. The original estate of Eleazer Brown and much more passed from é 82 MEMOIR. his hands into those of his grandson, Jacob Brown Farmer, and is now the property of Daniel B. Clark. Abishai’s second son, Abishai by name, was a captain, then a major, in the Revolution. He received the southern part of his father’s farm, near Mr. Frank Dakin’s, and lived in a house standing in what is now the crossing of the roads, opposite Mrs. Hil- dreth’s. On the strength of his revolutionary experiences, he gained credit as a bone-setter. Dying, he transmitted his estate to his son Abishai, third of the name, who in turn died a single man, within the memory of many. Hepzibah, the youngest daughter of Eleazer Brown, married John Flint, one of the prominent men of the town in his day. Their grandson, John Flint, now lives on his ancestor’s place, and their granddaughter, Clarissa Hunt, wife of Daniel Hunt, has been known by many members of the Circle. The fortunes of one son of Eleazer remain to be consid- ered, namely, of Ezekiel Brown, Sen’r, the father of Dr. Brown. He was born in Concord, July 13, 1720, the tenth of twelve children. At the age of twenty, May 14, 1741, he married Abigail Davis, a neighbor’s daughter. Two months later he joined the church. Two months before, his father gave him a hundred pounds to start him in the world. So at twenty-one years and thirteen days he had all the requi- sites for a successful and reputable life, —a wife, money in his purse, and that standing in society which membership of a church was apt to give in those days. There is some reason to believe that he owned a part of the old Tolman house. He certainly held a few detached pieces of land near his father’s place. The chances are, that for .a dozen years or so he helped his father on his farm, as at that period he is styled in legal papers yeoman. He did some military serv- ice, was sergeant, then lieutenant, and at the time of his father’s death was absent in that expedition against the Aca- dians, to which Longfellow, in his ‘ Evangeline,” has given a dubious immortality. In 1754 he bought eighty acres in Groton of Gershom Fletcher, and moved to that town. Dun- EZEKIEL BROWN. 83 . Stable in 1761 warns Lieutenant Ezekiel Brown, Abigail his wife, and their seven children, Ezekiel, Eunice, Sherwin, Hepzibah, Abigail, Mary, Beriah, and Hannah, who have lately come from Groton, to depart,.as the town refuses to admit them as citizens. I think that the elder Ezekiel was at this time poor. Not that the proclamation of Dunstable proves it. For our. Puritan fathers, not given to hospitality, and having no desire to risk entertaining angels unawares, and having before their eyes always the danger of increasing their poor rates, warned, with very little discrimination, all new-comers. I conjecture Mr. Brown’s poverty rather from the fact that within a few years he lived at Concord, then at Groton, then at Dunstable, in a year or two was back to Gro- ton, and in as brief time was trying Dunstable again. And there being no evidence to the contrary, one always assumes that a rolling stone is not gathering much moss. In 1781 he was with his youngest son Beriah in Clinton, Me., and paid a tax there, with which fact our knowledge of him ends. Dr. Ezekiel Brown, the member of the Social Circle, was his eldest son, and was born in Concord, March 11, 1744. He was ten years old, therefore, when his father carried him to Groton, We have seen that at sixteen he was included in the warning so kindly extended to his family by the town of Dunstable. Somewhere and somehow, amidst the nume- rous family migrations, he must have received a respectable education, for he wrote a good hand, expressed himself with vigor, and had a good degree of business efficiency. In 1766, at the age of twenty-two, he returned to his native place. Old Concord, not to be behind its younger sister, Dunstable, in its attentions to strangers, warns Ezekiel Brown, who came from Dunstable in 1766, to depart, as the town does not propose to receive back this wanderer into its fold. Nothing daunted by his cool reception, the young man commenced business, as a general trader, in the old Jarvis house, now owned and occupied by Mrs. Ezekiel 84 MEMOIR. Brown and her son George F., who are, I take the liberty to guess, distant relatives of the doctor himself. This was in 1768 or 69. In 4770 he was licensed as a retailer in the town of Concord. In 1772 he was owner of the Deacon Tol- man house, with the barn and six and a half acres adjoining. One half of the house he bought of Benjamin Barrett for #112. The other half, and all the land, we may conjecture that he had from his father, as he says in a deed that he has a good right to the estate by purchase and inheritance. This estate was a triangular Jot, beginning on Lexington Street, at the land of the late Charles B. Davis, and running on that street forty rods to the outer front corner of the court-house lot. It then turned with the North Quarter road, and fol- lowed that estate twelve rods until it reached the road, then the way to the common fields, and closed by what was called the Great Gate. [This is the street which runs by the side of Miss Emeline E. Barrett’s house.] This way it followed forty-three rods five feet, until it struck the continuation of Mr. Davis’s line, nearly opposite the commencement of the old Agricultural grounds, about one hundred feet before you reach the big gnarled oak in the sidewalk. By express state- ment the Old Burying Ground and a small lot, afterwards used for a slaughter-house, were excepted from the conveyance. The estate comprised the land on which now stand the Tol- man house, Mr. Cyrus Pierce’s, Mrs. Humphrey Buttrick’s, the Catholic church, the town-house, the court-house, and more than a dozen buildings on the Bedford road. Shortly after this estate came into Dr. Brown’s possession, he ob- tained on mortgage of David Whitaker, Reuben Brown, and others, £133 6s. 8¢., and afterwards on a second mortgage of Joseph Lee and John Buttrick, #70. These sums were probably used in his business, ‘The indications are, that for several years he had a large and profitable trade. But with the near approach of the Revolution, business was involved in confusion, property diminished in value, and debtors were slow to pay, and we need not ascribe to Dr. Brown either EZEKIEL BROWN. 85 dishonesty or marked business incapacity, when we chronicle that in 1773 he was unable to meet his debts. His largest creditors were Nathan Frazier and Frederic William Geyer, who constituted the firm of Frazier & Geyer. These gentle- men were sufficiently sharp with their debtor. The sum total of the debt was £274 155. It consisted of two small notes overdue six months, a large one overdue less than two months, and a book account of fifty odd pounds, just due, when legal proceedings were commenced. The brevity of the indulgence indicates the financial uncertainty of the times, the severity of the customs towards debtors, and per- haps a special distrust of the debtor in hand. At any rate, a suit was brought in the County Court, May, 1773, car- tied up to the Supreme Court, and in October of the same year decided against the debtor. A writ of execution was” placed in the hands of Josiah Otis, Jr., deputy sheriff. He, finding no goods worth seizing, committed Ezekiel Brown to his majesty’s jail in Boston, December 14, 1773. The fact that no valuable property was found, shows the depression at that time of real estate; for at a prosperous period the rights of redemption of the Tolman estate would have paid the claim in full. The doctor lay in Boston jail until Gen- eral Washington drove the British out of the city in March, 1776, a period of two years and three months. Then his patriotic creditor having retired to England to the society of his friends, there remained none to molest. During his im- prisonment the doctor studied medicine, and after his release went as a surgeon into the American army. The time of this service may be fixed with reasonable certainty as from 1778 to 1781. In 1777 he was chosen clerk of market and tithing man in Concord. The end of the war found him again in Concord. Situated as he was, heavy debts hang- ing over him, he could not engage in trade. He turned to his new profession. The character and amount of his prac- tice cannot be determined. But the fact of his practice is certain. He is uniformly called in legal papers physician. 86 / MEMOIR. October 11, 1785, he recovered at law a large bill for med- ical services. One anecdote is preserved, important only as showing that he was in the list of the practitioners of the town, and probably after his imprisonment. Old Mr. Hodg- man says, that when he was a boy his sister had what is called a jumping toothache. Her friend, Hepsy Barron, says, “Why don’t you get Dr. Brown to pull it? He won’t charge you anything.” The advice was taken. Upon her return, Hepsy’s first salutation was, “Did he pull it?” “Yes,” was the cheerful answer, “ but he charged enough,” was added, not so cheerfully. This, we think, must have occurred as late as 1789, just after the doctor’s release from his last imprisonment. The return of peace brought back all the old financial dif- ficulties. Mr. Geyer was a thorough tory, who, during the war, and some time after, resided in England. He must have done a large business, for after the war he recovered of one William Allen .£16,000, and of another person £4,000. He at once commenced a fresh attack on Dr. Brown. In the April session of the County Court, after recounting the cause of the suit in 1773, without, however, making any allu-. sion to two and a quarter years’ imprisonment, he proceeds to say, “Yet tho requested said Brown has never paid either of said plaintiffs, but has refused to do so to the damage of the said Frazier & Geyer, as they assert, of £600. The court awarded, interest and costs included, £498 175. The Supreme Court, upon appeal, swelled this by costs to 4508 1s. This was April 3, 1786. The writ of execution was put in the hands of Jonas Lee, deputy sheriff. He found, as his predecessor did, the Tolman estate. Property was ruinously low. Still real estate had some value, ‘Three ap- praisers, Ephraim Wood,. Samuel Jones, and John White, estimated the property at £450, and the right of redemption over the mortgages at £201 19s. 2d. Could even this sum have been obtained in 1773, it would nearly have discharged the debt; for at that time the doctor owed on mortgages EZEKIEL BROWN. 87 #203 6s. 8d, and Frazier & Geyer £274 15s., or a sum total of £478 1s. 8d. There can be little doubt that, under favor- able circumstances, the estate would have paid the debt. August 23, 1786, Duncan Ingraham, as agent for Frazier & Geyer, receipted for £201 19s. 2¢@. Waiting a few months, perhaps for instructions from London, in April, 1787, he made a fresh demand for the payment of the balance, now swelled to some thirty or forty pounds more than the orig- inal debt. Then it was, I presume, that Dr. Brown of- fered to settle in government securities, as is stated in Mr. Shattuck’s sketch. That is, he offered to pay with what he himself had received for military services, and not unlikely for old debts too. This offer was not accepted. An execu- tion was ordered April 17, 1787. The debtor was commit- ted to Concord jail May 13, 1787; recommitted to the same place, after an escape, May 8, 1788; removed to Cambridge July 7, 1788 ; and finally released, by order of his creditors, June 27, 1789, after a second imprisonment of two years and one month, or about four years and one half in all. Without entering at all into the question of the personal character of the doctor, it stands on the surface that this was a sharp specimen of the hard treatment granted to unfortunate debt- ors in that day.. Hard treatment which, in this case, was rendered no softer by the reflection that it was inflicted by the Aands of an agent, who was a thorough tory all through the war, and of a principal, who had gathered together all he could and fled his country, and who now from England is- sued his mandates ; and that it was received by one who, in. his own person and that of at least five of his relatives and connections, had borne the burdens and encountered the dangers of the war. It was just the kind of treatment which led to the Shays’ and Shattuck’s insurrections. Such griev- ances are forcibly expressed in the memorial of the committee of eighteen towns, which met at Concord, August 23, 1786. Grievance 5. The want of a circulating medium has so stag- nated business, that, unless speedily remedied, it will involve. 88 MEMOIR. the greater part of the community in hopeless bankruptcy. Grievance 6. The taking of men’s bodies and confining them in jail for debts, when they have property sufficient to answer the demands of their creditors. , Dr. Brown married (at what date and in what place I have not been able to ascertain, but probably about 1771) Mary Barron, who was the daughter of Oliver and Mary Barron, and born July, 1753. -The Barrons were probably a Groton or Chelmsford family. They were also, what we often find in New England, a decaying family. The ancestors had been thoroughly respectable. One of the Concord Barrons, Ben- jamin, died in the middle of the century worth nearly $10,000. But Oliver Barron was a shiftless, and, on the whole, a dis- reputable fellow ; a man given to drink, who paid no regard to the Sabbath, but who, working seven days in the week, was always half a century behind those who worked six in a manly fashion. He owned in the North Quarter a little, rocky farm, hard but strong land, of fifty acres. It was just on the edge of Carlisle, back a quarter of a mile from the Cameron house. Upon this farm stood a story and a half hut, unpainted, unclapboarded, perhaps sixteen feet square, and having a stone projection on one side, which was the over, its door opening inward into the room. Inside this hut was unplastered, the sheathing boards being pasted over with brown paper and newspapers to keep out cold. A ladder led up to a little hole, politely called a chamber. Another lad- der led down to the cellar. This valuable edifice, upon the death of its owner, was appraised at ten dollars. Two large Lombardy poplars, growing out of the cellar, and which were said to have been planted by the daughter Hannah, mark the site of the place, and can be seen to-day by the curious. In this hut Oliver Barron brought up, or suffered to grow up, ten children. Two anecdotes will show the character of the man, and the estimation in which he was held. He had a large orchard, mainly of ungrafted fruit, whose product he to a great degree turned into cider. On one occasion his taxes EZEKIEL BROWN. 89 fell due, and he had nothing which he could turn into money but cider. So he harnessed his old horse and started for Charlestown to dispose of the requisite quantity. But such was his general incapacity to do anything but eat and drink and potter about the farm, that he had to take his-wife Molly to do the trading and make the change. He never got in hay enough to keep his few cattle through the winter. When he was hard up he used to go to his neighbor, Charles Brown, who lived in the old:Mason house, to borrow what he called a jag of hay. Not being so prompt to pay as to borrow, Mr. Brown became tired of the custom. One day when the old man had shouldered his pitchfork, on which was a good bun- dle of hay, he offered his neighbor. Buttrick’s roguish boy a small sum if he would set fire to the bundle. Nothing loath, the boy did it. After a while the heat told its own story. Mr. Barron threw down the bundle, saying, with great cool- ness, considering the warmth of the occasion, “* Humph! Buttrick’s devil Joe’s work.” The hero was Mr. Joe But- trick, father-in-law of Charles Dakin. Tradition fails to re- cord whether this fire in the rear cured its object of his bor- rowing propensities. Suffice it to say, that at his death he had pretty much ate and drank up his farm, so that there was little or nothing left when the widow’s thirds were allowed. Dr. Brown’s mother-in-law was the opposite of her husband. She was sober and virtuous, a member of the church, and a truly good woman. All the thrift of the establishment was concentrated in her. She rode to market on horseback two or three times a week, with panniers, doing her own and her neighbor’s little marketing. It was on her return from one of these expeditions that she met in the highway, at the top of Nathan Barrett’s hill, a black bear, possibly the last of that respectable family who honored Concord with his resi- dence. She must have been a kind-hearted woman and effi- cient in her benevolence ; for it is affectionately remembered by the old people, that if there was a death in the neighbor- hood, or a case of great sickness, or any kind of sorrow ex- go MEMOIR. perienced, old Molly Barron was the first to come to the post of fatigue or danger, and the last to desert it. Of the ten children, the boys, by some principle of natural selection, not mentioned by Darwin, took mainly after the father, andthe girls after the mother. Elias was a trooper in the Revolution, and afterwards a day laborer in Carlisle. He made no headway in the world, but died poor, leaving a son in the almshouse. Oliver was a foot soldier in the Rev- olution, then a sailor. Finally he was shipwrecked in winter, and so badly frozen and crippled that he was an object of charity the rest of his days. Ben. Barron, the third son, was the black sheep in the fold. He was a butcher, given to drink, and light-fingered. At that period there were two Blood families, Ezra and Jeremiah, one on the edge of Car- lisle, the other in Bedford. The whole families, men, women, and children, some ten or a dozen in all, carried on a steady system of night thieving. Not a piece of linen, or an article of clothing, or a tool of any kind, could be left out with im- punity. My informant remembers being sent out barefoot more than once to bring in the axe, or the beetle and wedges, which he had carelessly left out. Their attentions to their neighbor’s poultry were so notorious, that they were called “Hen-roost Bloods.” One story has a dry humor about it which entitles it to preservation. A farmer was out one evening surveying his outbuildings, when he espied one of the Bloods approaching his sheep-fold. Hiding behind a shed he awaited the result. “Mr. Ram,” says the marauder, addressing with utmost gravity the horned guardian of woolly innocence, “I want a fine young lamb.” “ Take your choice,” was the answer in a feigned voice. ‘TI will take this one,” throwing a fat young lamb, the best in the flock, over his shoulder. “And Mr. Ram, hark ye, please call day after to-morrow morning at daybreak and I will pay you four dollars.” Punctually, at the time appointed, the ram, led by his master, and with a purse around his neck, was butted against the door. The thief opened the door and took a EZEKIEL BROWN. 91 look. Then, as if the ram was the real hero of the transac- tion, he cried out, ‘* Cuss the brute, I did n’t think he heard what I said.” He went in, got four dollars, put it in the purse, slammed to the door, and retired. With this thieving gang Ben. Barron became connected, first by marriage with one of the daughters, afterwards by participation in the lar- cenies. These robberies became so frequent, and so utterly unbearable, that the whole neighborhood was aroused. A watch was set, the culprits detected in their evil deeds, and hunted down, Eleven, including Ben. Barron, were arrested. He escaped by turning state’s evidence. The rest were con- victed, and men and women alike were whipped in Concord Square, and then sent to Castle Island, in Boston Harbor, whence they never returned. Ben. survived but a little while, though long enough to be fined for purloining a silk hand- kerchief from the store of Deacon White. In 1796 he fell dead, in the field front of his father’s holse, of apoplexy. His son David is now in our poor-house. The Barron girls were fashioned of different stock. Most of them made respectable marriages. Hannah, a single woman, supported herself to an extreme old age by honest labor, leaving property something more than sufficient to bury her. She was the heroine of the Ephraim Jones tavern, who, on the rgth of April, 1775, protected the province treas- urer’s money chest from the British soldiers, by insisting sturdily that the room in which it was placed was her bed- chamber. Mary, the doctor’s wife, was a good and pleasant girl, with many of her mother’s virtues and a somewhat bet- ter education. She was ir Concord several times in the first years of the century, and left a pleasant impression upon the minds of those who saw her. Mr. Shattuck says, in his sketch, that the first Circle was broken up-by the garrulousness of the doctor, who would do all the talking. Excuse me, if, in audacious defiance of the antiquarian lore of Mr. Shattuck and of a cherished tradi- tion of the Circle, as old, perhaps, as I am, I pronounce this 92 MEMOIR. a most lame and impotent conclusion. That twenty-four men of character and standing, and of no little obstinacy of disposition, too, should give up a cherished social enjoyment on account of one long tongue, has always been too much for my faith. Let me offer an explanation which seems more ptobable. The causes of the dissolution were probably per- sonal enmity, party animosity, and social distinctions. What cause was there for personal enmity? Duncan Ingraham, then one of the leading men in the Circle, was made the agent, after the war, of his son-in-law, Mr. Geyer, to col- lect Dr. Brown’s debt by all means, fair or foul. [It is to be noted, that before the war Mr. Ingraham had had nothing to do with the matter.] Efforts to this end began, I presume, as early as 1783 or ’84, by importunities and threats of all sorts. Then followed the suit at law, then the seizure of the house, and all culminated in a harsh and useless impris- onment, in the utter ruin of professional business, and in the wretched poverty of a wife and seven children, the eldest scant fourteen years old. Can we conceive of the princi- pal actors in such transactions meeting week after week in social relations without bitter encounters, — when, too, it is pretty sure that both had their friends in the Circle? Add, now, this other fact, that Geyer was a thorough tory, who had fled the country; that Mr. Ingraham never had any love. to spare for the colonies until the surrender of Cornwallis destroyed the hopes of the most sanguine British sympa- thizer ; and, finally, that the Browns, in each and every branch, were thorough-going patriots, who had proved their devotion by hard and poorly-paid services, and you have the amplest cause of division. Consider one other fact. Duncan Ingraham was an aristocrat, affecting the society of grand people, given to making feasts for British officers and men of blood and mark, but somewhat coarse and rough in his treatment of those whom he disliked. The Browns, at any rate of the Eleazer stock, were by position democrats, men, some of them, strong, sturdy men, who were struggling up by EZEKIEL BROWN. 93 hard toil from poverty to comfortable circumstances and re- spectable position. I cannot think that such men would fit together well. The second casualty of the Circle proves how sensitive some of its members were to anything which savored of aristocratic pretensions, for it took just two ostentatious suppets to suspend its life for a year. The doctor may have been very outspoken, very pugnacious in defense of his rights, very tenacious in his memory of wrongs, and very free in maintaining his side of the controversy. But his after career proves him to have been a man of more than ordinary force of character, and not the garrulous fool Mr. Shattuck’s sketch would paint him. In 1789 or ’90, Dr. Brown moved with his family to that part of Clinton, Kennebec Co., Me., which has been within fifty years incorporated under the name of Benton. He was forty-six years old. Two distinct plans of life had ended in complete failure. He had suffered hardships, if not wrongs, sufficient to break the courage of most men. That he started afresh proves his will; that he succeeded, his capacity. He had a wife and seven children dependent upon him, the old- est son being but fifteen years old. All that he had to look to for support was his hands and five or six hundred acres of wild, uncleared land in a new town in Maine, which land had little or no moneyed value, and which he held under what his son calls a King George grant. To the work given him to do he buckled’ down bravely. With what help he could get from his sons, he built hima hut and began to clear his farm, meanwhile doing all the business as a physician which he could. He prospered wonderfully. As his family grew up, he erected on the place a large frame house, in which they kept a tavern, and sold, I am afraid, a good deal of liquor, as Maine taverns then, if not now, were very sure to do. ‘The doctor withdrew from the active care of the house and farm, and devoted himself thenceforth to the practice of medicine, in which he continued actively almost to his eight- ieth year. In his day he was accounted, not only in his own 94 MEMOIR. town, but also throughout the county, an excellent physician. He held the office of town clerk and selectman, and was in all respects a prominent and influential citizen. He died June 30, 1824, a little over eighty years old, leaving a nice property in the shape of a large and excellent farm, well cleared, well kept, and well stocked. He probably had, be- sides, money at interest, but of that I have not certain in- formation. His wife died May 6, 1832, aged seventy-nine. There were four sons and four daughters, of whom three sons and four daughters were born in Concord, and one son in Benton. Beriah, the last child born in Concord, is now liv- ing on the father’s place, a feeble, old man of eighty-three. Samuel, the son born in Maine, has a farm, which belonged to his father, in the next town of Winslow, and is eighty. Hep- zibah, a widowed sister, survives in the same town at the great age of eighty-seven. The business of tavern-keeping, with its adjunct of a bar-room, was not altogether favorable, morally, to the doctor’s family. One son and several grand- sons were ruined by intemperance. But in Benton and the vicinity there are a great many descendants. Most of them are hard-working and reasonably well off. Generally speak- ing, they are persons of ability and considerable influence, as I am informed. A strong stock, with the faults of strength of will and passion rather than the faults of weak- ness ! To any one who has followed this memoir and accepted its statements, it must seem evident that Mr. Shattuck’s sketch gives a very incomplete, if not false, impression of Dr. Brown. .So far from being a weak and vain man, the probabilities are that he was by nature one of the strongest and ablest of the early members of the Circle. I do not think that it is clear, either, that he was a man of a bad temper. Few people would look back in memory across forty or fifty years to such an experience as he went through in Concord, and think kindly of the men who imprisoned him; or even have pleasant recollections of the society that witnessed his FOSEPH BROWN. 95 discomfiture. His manly and successful efforts to retrieve his fortunes entitle him to respect ; and it seems to me to be full time that in our annals he should be restored to good fellowship and to an honorable position. September, 1871. MEMOIR OF JOSEPH BROWN. “ Stat nominis umbra.” 96 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF REUBEN BROWN, BY WILLIAM WHITING. Lieutenant Reuben Brown was born in Sudbury, in the County of Middlesex and Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in the year 1748. He was the son of Mr. Jotham Brown, of Sudbury aforesaid. He served his apprenticeship with his father, after which he came to Concord, in 1770, and com- menced business as a saddler. In 1771 or 1772 he married Molly, daughter of Colonel Ezekiel Howe, of Sudbury, by whom he had three sons and four daughters. His children were educated as well as the times would afford, and always moved in the first circle in the town. The daughters were all married ; one to Colonel Thatcher, one to General Jones, one to Major Hammond, and one to William Heywood. Mrs. Hammond was left a widow, and afterwards married Caleb Billings. Of the sons, one of whom is still living, the youngest only was married. Reuben Brown was always a remarkably active, energetic, and intelligent man. He was social, witty, and equally ready to take and give a good joke. For feats of agility or strength he was unsurpassed by any of his age and size. He was the greatest wrestler in this vicinity. His son Tilly equaled his father in this respect. Mr. Brown was success- fully engaged in carrying on his trade when the Revolu- tionary War broke out, and had been chosen Lieutenant of one of the military companies. On the 19th of April, 1775, when it was rumored that the British were on their way from Boston towards Con- REUBEN BROWN. 97 cord, Lieutenant Brown was ordered by Major Buttrick of this town to go towards Boston and obtain information in relation to their movements. He arrived at Lexington just as the British fired upon the devoted militia, and returned without waiting to ascertain the result of the attack. Major Buttrick inquired if the British fired balls. “I do not know,” was the reply, “but I think it probable.” On the same day, by order of Colonel Barrett, Lieutenant Brown rode more than one hundred miles on horseback to spread the alarming news of the massacre at Lexington and the advance of the enemy towards Concord ; this circum- stance not only shows the great physical strength of the man, but also the patriotic feelings which could enable him to bear such extraordinary fatigue. He was employed by our government to fit out several companies, both foot and horse, with all their equipments for the war, and he had the misfortune to lose $1,000 by one of the government con- tractors, who, after having received the money, never paid it over to Lieutenant Brown. After the war was over, he did quite an extensive business at his trade; he was known far and near as a smart business man, shrewd in making a bargain ; he was kind to his neigh- bors, public spirited, and generous to the poor. I will now relate an anecdote which may tend in some measure to show what manner of man he was. It occurred under my own observation. One warm and sultry day in August Mr. Brown rode on horseback in front of my shop ; the old gentleman was then more than seventy-five years of age, the flies troubled the horse very much, and he seemed so restless that I almost feared for the safety of the rider, but to my surprise Mr. Brown gave him a violent blow with a raw-hide whip, which made him caper all over the door-yard, exclaiming, at the same time, in a loud voice, “ Why, you devil you, what ails you?” Said I, “ You have a colt there Mr. Brown, have you not?” “Yes, d—n him,” said he, “he has been a colt 7 98 MEMOIR. for more than twenty-five years, and I believe he always will be.” I might relate more of the same nature, but one will be sufficient. Towards the latter part of his life he became a member of the church, but at what time, his son, Deacon Reuben Brown (to whom I am indebted for most of the above statements), does not remember. He died in 1832, leaving a handsome estate to his heirs. January, 1854. EMERSON COGSWELL. 99 MEMOIR OF EMERSON COGSWELL. BY WILLIAM S. ROBINSON, Emerson Cogswell was the son of Emerson Cogswell and Mary Pecker, his wife, and I suppose was born in Ipswich, a direct descendant of John Cogswell, the first settler of that town. I have a paper dated June 10, 1793, in which Emer- son Cogswell, first named, acting as attorney for his mother, Mary Cogswell, makes an agreement with Thomas Burnham, administrator of the estate of his father, Thomas Burnham, in relation to the “thirds” due to Mary from a piece of property, a house and land. The agreement is that Burn- ham is to pay thirty-six shillings annually to Mary or her attorney, during the natural life of said Mary. I have not been able to ascertain the date of Mr. Cogswell’s birth. His second child was born in 1774. Emerson Cogswell, Sen’r, was a tanner, who carried on business near the stone bridge in Ipswich. Mary Pecker was the daughter of James Pecker, a Boston wharfinger, and his wife Bridget. There was a sister of Mary Pecker, named Susannah, who kept a “ pastry school,” and lived to a great age. I have seen some pa- triotic verses written by her against the use of tea in the Revolutionary times. The widow, Mary Pecker Cogswell, as we have seen, was living in 1793, and probably her husband had not then been long dead. She lived with her son Emer- son in Concord, and kept a school in the house, which her grandchildren attended. The name of Emerson, I conclude, got into the Cogswell family through the marriage of William Cogswell, son of the first settler, with Mary, daughter of Rev. John Emerson, of Gloucester. I have been informed that Mr. Cogswell moved from Bos- 100 MEMOIR. ton to Concord during the Revolution. He kept a tavern in the building which, when I first knew it, was occupied by Deacon Jarvis, the old bake-house. Shattuck’s ‘‘ History,” page 357, mentions him as lieutenant under Captain Fran- cis Brown, of Lexington. On page 353 he is also mentioned as second lieutenant of the Concord company, under the organization made in February, 1776, George Minot being captain, and Edward Wright first lieutenant. The’ title of lieutenant clung to him probably through life. I have heard my mother say that people were in the habit of coming to the house and inquiring, “Is Leftenant Cogsdill at home?” [Perhaps I may as well say here that the name of Cogswell is misspelled in Mr. Surette’s ‘‘ History of Corinthian Lodge.” There is only one g, as in negro. Mr. Cogswell was not a member of that lodge, but his son William was.] In 1776 the company was employed at Cambridge, and in 1778 in Rhode Island six weeks. So he was a patriot and no tory. I suppose the records of your club or Circle, or the biogra- phies cf some of its members, will tell what his connection was with its formation. I have heard that he was one of the founders, and that it was substantially the Committee of Safety. I have been told that he and Judge Fay’s father were the latest of the original members who survived (per- haps after some temporary discontinuance). Cogswell and Fay met regularly, and had good and satisfactory times to- gether. After Mr. Cogswell left the tavern, he carried on the hat- ting business, back of the meeting-house. I seem to remem- ber, though I am not quite sure, that hats were made there when I was quite young. The brook which ran in that neighborhood was a convenience in this manufacture. Hats were afterwards made by James Cogswell and others, in the building where I began later to print the ‘“‘ Yeoman’s Ga- zette,” on the opposite corner from Billings’s stable, though I believe this stable is now discontinued. James Cogswell was of another branch. He is living, or was lately, in Bal- EMERSON COGSWELL. IOI timore. Frederic Cogswell, of Concord, is his son, and I suppose he is the only one in the town who bears the name of Cogswell. I remember when this hat shop of “ Jim Cogs- well” was burned, and an old “jour” named Bishop (I think) was smothered or else burned to death. Hats were made, say about 1830, on the “ Mill Dam,” by Comfort Fos- ter and Elisha Colburn and others. My father worked there, and I used to go to and fro across the common with fifteen to twenty hats strung over my shoulder, my mother being one of the trimmers. Elisha Colburn (or Coburn, I forget which) was tyler of the Masonic Lodge, and his sanguinary appearance, as he sat upon the seat at the lodge door in the upper story of the old brick school-house, struck me and the other boys with terror, even though I knew Colburn pretty well. The jours were a pretty hard set. But I do not know that Emerson Cogswell, who carried on the business, was “hard,” and to him let me return after this unpardonable digression. He is said to have made the first napped hats in this region, having learned the art and mystery in Canada somewhere about 1790 or later, I suppose, for when he went there he was accompanied by my father, William Robinson, and his son William Cogswell, both youngsters, born, the first in 1776, and the second in 1778. They went in the winter, with a Sleigh and two horses, and once, in crossing a lake, Mr. Cogswell, hearing the ice crack behind him, whipped up his horses and got clear, but the team behind him went through and was lost. He failed in business on account of one Brown, for whom he was “bound.” Brown fled to Western Virginia. Mr. Cogswell and Captain Saf- ford of Beverly went in pursuit of him on horseback, and found him in Wellsburg. They got some land of him, but it was never of any value to Mr. C. or any of his descendants. Some years ago two of my brothers, Franklin and Jeremiah, then living in Ohio, visited Wellsburg and found traces of the property in the registry of deeds, but concluded there was no utility in trying to get hold of it. 1am willing to 102 MEMOIR. dispose of my share on the terms Henry Thoreau was going to take Fairhaven Cliffs for cultivation (according to Mr. Nathan Brooks), “‘at the halves.” Mr. Cogswell was prob- ably absent many months. Mrs. Davis, the widow of his son William (now living in Concord), remembers when he and Safford returned one Sunday in January, 1800, with a pair of horses and a sleigh loaded with furs. Meanwhile an attachment had been put upon his property and the doors closed. ‘Grandfather said (I quote from a letter to me, written by Mrs. Davis’s daughter, Mrs. Morse, also now living in Concord) that he should not run away, nor have his doors closed by man,” and threw them open. On Monday Major Hosmer, the officer, took him to jail, where .he remained until Captain Safford took his property and settled the debts. The property remained in the Safford family till it went into its present hands, I suppose. It was the large building on the corner opposite Charles B. Davis’. Mr. Cogswell planted the elm-tree at the corner.. Mrs. Davis remembers seeing the buckets of specie with which the debt was paid by Saf- ford. Ihave not been able to find out how long he lived there. He took boarders previous to his financial troubles, and Mrs. Davis says that Dr. Ripley boarded with him from the time he came to Concord (1778) until his marriage. I have heard that Mr. Cogswell fell out with Dr. Ripley, and finally refused any longer to hear him. Mrs.’ Davis remem- bers hearing him say that he went to hear the doctor preach as long as he got any information from him. This, perhaps, implied that others went to hear him longer. Dr. Ripley, however, was a frequent visitor at the house, and I believe they were persbnally on good terms. Mr. Cogswell read his Bible diligently, and perhaps ostentatiously, as the people went by his house to meeting. He advised (probably co- erced) his children and all the members of his family to go to meeting, no doubt trusting to their good sense to find out when the supply of information failed, and he enjoined on my uncle, John Robinson, to remember the texts. ‘If any EMERSON COGSWELL. 103 of the children remained at home, it was his practice to keep them very quiet during meeting time. They must either sit on their blocks and hear him read, or read their own books.” “But the children had to go to meeting usually, whether they all had bonnets to wear or not,” says Mrs. Davis. I have in my possession the Bible which I suppose is the one Mr. Cogswell read while the people went to meeting. On a fly-leaf is written, ‘Emerson Cogswell, his book, given him by his mother, Eunice Robinson, to be given to his son Emer- son Cogswell after his decease, _Concord, December, 1799.” This Emerson was a son of the subject of this sketch, and the fact that the Bible was given-to him by his mother leads me to suppose that Eunice Robinson inherited it from some of her own family. She seems to have preferred her own name to that of her husband in making this gift. Per- haps the entry was made by the son however. The Cogs- well to whom the Bible was given had several children, but they all died between 1806 and 1826, and his widow (who died in Bedford, 1832) gave the Bible to my mother, after his decease, and she gave it to me in'1855. The Bible is a Dublin ‘edition of 1714, and has all the services of the Church of England, Sternhold and Hopkins, the thirty-nine articles, Apocrypha, and so on. The best used parts of it are the New Testament and the Psalms. These parts bear the marks of a good deal of thumbing, whether by Mr. ' Emerson Cogswell or his son I cannot say, but I am quite sure that, except for the purposes of .this biography, I have not misused it. Mr. Cogswell moved from the corner house to the “shop house,” where he lived several years ; then to the Curtis house, where they remained but a short time, and finally drifted further into the “ East Quarter,” into a house belonging to Jonathan Hoar. Here he died of consump- tion, his health having begun to fail before he moved from the shop house.. He was buried on the hill, and I believe near the powder house. I am not sure whether there is a stone or not, and I cannot say what year he died ; it was 104 MEMOIR. after 1803. Dr. Ripley attended the funeral, which was in the month of May, and he said, ‘if there was a good man he thought Mr. Cogswell was one, though they differed in their religious views.” In person Mr. Cogswell was portly, not to say fat, so that his wife was obliged to buckle his shoes. He wore small- clothes. His first wife was Eunice Robinson (who gave the Bible). [And Emerson Cogswell’s sister, Susanna, married my grandfather, Jeremiah Robinson.] Emerson and Eunice Cogswell had eight children, to wit: dZary Cogswell (born before marriage). She married Michael Stone, M. D., of Framingham or Weston. S7ridget, born April 25, 1774, burned to death young. Zwcy, born April 27, 1776, married James Call of Charlestown ; was a widow many years, and for the last twenty or thirty years of her life lived in the family of my brother Jeremiah. Died at his house in Jack- son, Michigan, past eighty years of age. Nochildren. W7/- zam, heretofore mentioned as having visited Canada with his father and cousin, my father, born April 5, 1778; died in Concord in 1827. (1.) Married Betsey Buttrick ; (2.) mar- ried Mary Buttrick, sister of Betsey. This is the Mrs. Davis who now lives in Concord with her daughter, Mrs. Morse, who is the only lineal descendant of Mr. Cogswell now living in the town. LZmerson, to whom the Bible was given, died in 1808, aged twenty-nine. His wife was Mary Hunt. Martha, my mother, born March 12, 1783, married William Robinson. Died at my home in Concord, November 24, 1856. Susanna married Simon Hunt, brother of Mary Hunt, wife of Emerson. I have not the date of Mrs. Cogswell’s (No. 1) death, but suppose that it was about 1788, for Mr. Cogswell was not a man to make unnecessary delays, and his second mar- riage (to Anna Learnard) took place May 3, 1789. Their children: ames, died in infancy ; Hannah, born January 7, 1791, married in 1826 Samuel Brooks of Charlestown ; after- wards moved to Warner, N. H., and then to Concord, N. H. EMERSON COGSWELL. 105 She died January, 1869. Mr. Brooks and a daughter are still living. Zdward, born August 20, 1792, a seaman I believe. I think he was lost at sea, and was taken prisoner during the war of 1812, and died young. The third wife —be patient —was Elizabeth Buttrick, widow of Nathan Buttrick of Concord, whose maiden name was Bateman. She was the mother of Betsey and Mary Buttrick, the two wives of William Cogswell. Children by Mrs. Buttrick : Azza, born August 20, 1797, married John Sweetser ; now living in Winchendon. She has one son liv- ing. JZary, born March 5, 1800, married John Corey, and afterwards Stephen Pierce of Chelmsford. Died some years ago. Lunice, born February 2, 1803, married Richard Whit- ney of Winchendon; now living a widow in Winchendon ; has seven children. The third wife survived Mr. Cogswell, and married for her third husband Amos Hayward of Win- chendon. Perhaps Mr. Heywood, the town clerk of Concord, who has promised me that he will look at the records of the town, can supply some information not here given relating to Mr. Cogswell. If so, I hope he will do it, hit or miss. The only additional item which I am at present able to sup- ply is the following, which I copy from the legislative re- solves of 1789 :— “On the petition of Emerson Cogswell, Resolved, that Ephraim Wood, Esq., administrator de donzs non in the estate of Robert Cuming, Esq., late of Concord, deceased, be, and hereby is, authorized to give a deed of a small piece of land, lying near Concord meeting-house, that was sold by John Cuming, Esq., former administrator of the estate of the said Robert Cuming to the said Emerson Cogswell, the said Cogswell paying for the same according to agreement. “Sent down for concurrence, “ SAMUEL PHILLIPS, JR., President. 106 MEMOIR. “InN THE House OF REPRESENTATIVES, Fanuary 31, 1789- “Read and Concurred, “THEODORE SEDGWICK, JR., Sfeaker. “ Approved, JoHN Hancock.” Since this sketch was completed I have received a letter from Mr. Heywood, who says: “I find by the record that Emerson Cogswell died May 13, 1808, aged sixty-four, and the only office that I find he held was that of hogreeve, prob- ably on account of his second marriage, and that was in 1794. At that time that office was considered a good posi- tion.” The ¢Azrd marriage Mr. Heywood should have said. I am glad to find that hogreeves were so highly esteemed in Concord. The uninstructed intellect would have supposed the office of town clerk, or of selectman, to be superior in dignity, if not usefulness. It is possible that my brothers, to whom I have written long ago on the subject, may sometime furnish me with new facts concerning Mr. Cogswell’s life. But I think it doubt- ful whether, at this late day, much more can be ascertained as to his life and character. Memorandum in J. A. Robinson’s family Bible. Emerson Cogswell died in Concord, May 13, 1808, aged sixty-four. The following notice of his death was copied from a Boston paper: “ He was a valuable member of society, and his loss is deeply regretted by many who have tasted of and experi- enced the substantial benefits of his beneficence. He was a faithful and interesting companion, and an honest man.” February 7, 1871, YONATHAN FAY. 107 MEMOIR OF JONATHAN FAY. BY JONATHAN F, BARRETT. Jonathan Fay was one of the original members of the So- cial Circle upon its final organization in 1795, and is men- tioned by Dr. Ripley among those who took part in its ear- lier, or, as our historical sketch of the club terms it, its second organization, in 1785 86. He was born in Westborough, Massachusetts, January 21, 1754. His parents were Captain Jonathan and Joanna Fay. His father died in 1800, at the age of seventy-five years, and on his grave-stone is the line — “An honest man’s the noblest work of God.” He was a farmer and large land-owner, owning all the land from the village of Westborough to his house, two miles dis- tant. It is remembered that General Putnam, on his way to Cambridge in the Revolution, stopped at his house over night, and the room he occupied is still pointed out, in the same condition now that it was then, — the walls covered with figures of birds and horses, painted black upon a white ground, the birds as large as the horses. Not only the father of Jonathan Fay, Captain Jonathan, but his grandfather and his great-grandfather certainly, lived in Westborough before him. His brother David succeeded to the old farm, and his brother John was a revolutionary pensioner and a farmer in good circumstances in Littleton. Jonathan and Nahum were educated at Cambridge. An old lady of Westborough still speaks of them as “ high bucks.” Nahum graduated in 1790—the class of Josiah Quincy. He was a physician of much repute, and practiced for a time 108 MEMOIR. in Boston. He had fascinating manners, and was a famous singer, and has often sung in the old church in this town. He died early. Jonathan Fay graduated in 1778. His most distinguished classmate was Nathan Dane. He was a student at the time the college was removed to Concord in 1775, and it was thus that he became acquainted with his future wife, Lucy Prescott. He married her December 6, 1776, before he graduated, and contrary to the rules of the institution, and the marriage was therefore kept secret until it could be revealed with impunity. His eldest child, the late Judge Fay, was born in the old Prescott house, the site of which is now occupied by the house of John B. Moore, in 1778. Mrs. Heywood, his eldest daughter, was born in West- borough ; his other children were born in Concord, after his final removal here, which occurred as soon as he had completed his professional studies, which he pursued with Mr. Hichborn, in Boston. He first lived in the house where Mrs. Mary Heywood re- sided at the time of her decease, and his office was first there. About 1790 he removed to the house now occupied by his only surviving child, Mrs. Abiel Heywood. His wife’s father, Dr. Abel Prescott, gave this house to Mrs. Fay. It had been “honest John Beaton’s ” house, whose widow Dr. Prescott had married for his second wife. The doctor, at the same time, removed to the next house below, on the same street, which he had built, and where he died in 1805, at the age of eighty-eight years. At this period, Mr. Fay built the little ever-gveen office that stood, until recently, a few rods north of his house, and it was his office until his death. It was afterwards the tem- porary sanctum of a then youthful and since distinguished counselor, who seems to Have cultivated the muses in those days, for the office has been celebrated in the following couplets which he is remembered to have improvised when called upon by an official for a description of his taxable effects : — FONATHAN FAY. 109 “Between ‘Elm Wood’ and ‘Button Row,’ A line of scraggy poplars grow ; Behind those poplars may be seen My worn-out office — painted green.” “Elm Wood” and “ Button Row ” were the names by which Mr. Fay’s and Mr. Reuben Brown’s estates were respec- tively known. At a more recent period, Dr. Heywood transacted much of 4zs multifarious business in the same office. When Mr.. Fay commenced practice in Concord, there was no other lawyer in the town, and it had been in that deplor- able condition since 1775, when Daniel Bliss, his immediate predecessor in the profession here, having become infected with toryism, found it prudent to leave so patriotic a local- ity, and his estate was confiscated. Before Mr. Bliss, only two lawyers are mentioned as in practice here, namely, John Hoar and Peter Bulkley, son of the first minister. Mr. Fay continued the only representative of his profession in town for about ten years, after which John Merrick, William Jones, Thomas Heald, John L. Tuttle, and Samuel Hoar, opened offices prior to his death. Of these Jones and Heald were his students, as was also Thomas O. Selfridge, who shot Charles Austin, was defended by Samuel Dexter, and acquitted. Mr. Fay was the last of the Concord lawyers who wore “smail-clothes”’ and the queue. He reached a very respectable rank, and had a good prac- tice. He usually attended the courts in Worcester County as well as Middlesex, and is said to have been styled “ the honest lawyer.” Isaac Fiske, Esquire, says of him, that when he came to the bar, which was about 1801, he was “county attorney, and a leading and popular man at the bar and in the county,” to whom, among others, he was ‘taught to look up with professional awe and respect.” He was a warm Federalist, but did not engage much in the political excitement of the times. He represented the town, however, in the legislature from 1792 to 1796. He IIO MEMOIR. was the first president of the Concord Fire Society, organ- ized in 1794, and of the “ Charitable Library Society,” which was formed in 1795, and afterwards, in 1821, merged in the “Concord Social Library.’ Like his brother Nahum, he was a fine singer, and led Dr. Ripley’s choir for many years. In his religious sentiments he was of the most liberal school of Unitarians, and in Azs day was called an Universalist. At that period the lawyers used to board, during the ses- sions of the courts in Concord, at Deacon Vose’s, and at Mr. Hubbard’s (father of Ebe. Hubbard). Mr. Fay.was fond of whist, and did not object to a social glass, and frequently, of an evening, joined his brethren at one or the other of those houses of resort. When he was not prepared “to tell a story,” he could always “sing asong.” His son was his con- temporary at the bar for some years, and on the occasion of one of the social gatherings referred to, he astonished his parent by suggesting that perhaps ‘ ‘Brother Fay” would favor the company with a song. His wife died greatly lamented by her husband, at the comparatively early age of thirty-four, October 10, 1792. At this time his children were at the “hospital,” which was in the house now occupied by Augustus Tuttle, undergoing in- oculation for the prevention of small-pox, and their mother’s death was concealed from them, and her remains embalmed, that they might see her once more before her interment. In the interval, he built the tomb at the southwest corner of the Hill Burying Ground, which was the first tomb built in Concord. Mrs. Fay is said to have been a woman of great beauty of character and person. Her father, Dr. Abel, and her grand- father, “ Major Jonathan Prescott, Esquire, M. D.,” whose wife was Major Peter Bulkley’s only daughter, were physi- cians of great eminence, and their practice extended through- out the county. Dr. Abel Prescott’s first wife — the mother of his children — was Abigail Brigham, and not Bugbee, as stated in Mr. Shattuck’s “ History.” FONATHAN FAY. III Mr. Fay did not marry again. His daughter says of him that he never spoke of his deceased wife without tears. He continued to reside with his children for the remainder of his life. He was an affectionate and beloved father, and his house was one of the centres of social attraction in Con- cord for many years. He was of attractive manners and per- son, a little above the medium height, quite stout, and ‘‘ car- ried his head high.” He died of a disease of the liver, June 1, 1811, at the age of fifty-seven years, leaving six children: Samuel Prescott Phillips ; Lucy, who married Dr. Abiel Heywood ; Joanna Phillips, who married Charles Parkman, of Westborough ; Sophia, who married Joseph Barrett; Maria, who married Daniel Denny, of Boston; and Abby Brigham, who married Simeon Putnam, of Andover. Fanuary 18, 1859. 112 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF JONAS HEYWOOD. BY LORENZO EATON. Jonas Heywood, the subject of this memoir, was great- grandson of John Heywood, who came to Concord before 1650, and was one of the first settlers of the town. He was grandson of Deacon John, Jr., and son of Samuel, who married Elizabeth Hubbard in 1710, and was deacon, town clerk, and otherwise distinguished as a good and useful cit- izen. He not only filled the many offices conferred upon him by the town with honor and fidelity, but he faithfully fulfilled his duty to his country, in bringing up and sending forth to the world a family of thirteen children, some of whom distinguished themselves as men of character and in- fluence, as good citizens, and as onest men. Jonas, who was one of the sons of Samuel, was born in Concord, August 21, 1721, at the old Heywood mansion, west of the depot, which had borne the family name since the first settlement of the town. Of his early history I could learn but little. He worked with his father in the summer upon the farm, and in the win- ter learned of him the shoemaker’s trade. In those days it was the custom for shoemakers to go from house to house in the neighborhood, and also to go to the adjoining towns, remaining at each house until they had made and repaired shoes enough to last the family through the season. Jonas, while an apprentice, was much pleased with these excur- sions, and, as my informant says, used often to speak of the glorious times he had with the girls. These excursions were called ‘‘ whipping the cat,” and, in all probability, while the old gent was “whipping the cat,” young Jonas was making love to one Anna Prescott, to whom he was married by the’ FONAS HEYWOOD. 113 Rev. Dr. Bliss, September 13, 1753. They had five chil- dren, — three sons and two daughters. Jonas, like his father, was one.of the most prominent cit- izens of the town. His character was irreproachable, and he filled the various offices conferred on him with trust and honor. He held the office of town clerk for twelve years, and was one of the selectmen quite a number of years. He was one of a company of minute-men raised by the'town in 1774. He also served with others on a committee of inspection, whose duties were to see to the punctual observance of the articles of association as agreed upon by the Continental Congress. In March, 1775, he was one of the citizens with whom pro- visions, gunpowder, etc., were stored. On the 26th of April, 1775, the town assumed the author- ity of an independent republic, and chose a committee, be- fore whom all persons suspected of treason should be tried. Mr. Heywood was chairman of that committee, and it was before him that Dr. Lee was tried for treason and found guilty; it being the opinion of the committee “that he be confined to the farm his family now lives upon,” — the farm now occupied by Samuel G. Wheeler, — “and if he should presume to go beyond its bounds and be killed, his blood shall be upon his own head.” It was told that, while he was under this sentence, some of the citizens, in trying their guns,. used to point them towards the farm, not caring if they should hit the traitor. Mr. Heywood served upon this committee from 1775 to 1783, after which there was no com- mittee chosen. Sixteen of the three hundred and eighty barrels of flour sent to Concord by Colonel Lee were stored with Mr. Hey- wood. Jonas Heywood was one of the first members of the Social Circle. At what time he joined does not appear by the rec- ords, and he remained a member until his death, which oc- curred July 28, 1808, aged eighty-seven years, February, 1856. 114 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF JOSEPH HOSMER. BY JOSEPHINE HOSMER. Major Joseph Hosmer was born on the 7th of January, 1736. James Hosmer came to Concord in 1635. He built a house on the land where Mrs. Damon’s house stands, and a saw-mill near the mill-dam. His eldest son, James, was Major Hosmer’s great-grandfather. An old deed gives him the title of carpenter and architect. He must have learned his trade in England, because he was married four years after he came to Concord, October 13, 1638, to Miss Sarah White, of London. Shewas a sister of Mrs. Rowlandson, wife of the, first minister of Lancaster. Mrs. R. was taken prisoner by the Indians. After a captivity of three years’ duration, she was released, and came to Concord to visit her sister, Mrs. Hos- mer. While here, she wrote the story of her captivity, which was published. In 1800 Major Hosmer caused a second edition of the little book to be printed, and distributed copies among his friends and relatives. James Hosmer, the second, lived just across the river from Mr. Derby’s. He was killed at Sudbury, while fighting under Captain Wadsworth. He and eight others were buried in one grave. Before he went to Sudbury, he is supposed to have buried all his tools, and they were never found afterward. He left a large tract of land, which was equally divided between his two sons, James and Thomas. James removed to Farmington, Connecticut. He is supposed to have sold his inheritance to his cousin, Stephen Hosmer, the ancestor of the other branch of the Hosmers, who lived near Mr. Abel Hosmer’s. Major Hos- mer’s grandfather, Thomas, married Hannah Hartwell, of Lincoln, and built the house where Mr. Elijah Hosmer lived, FOSEPH HOSMER. 115 who was the father of the two maiden ladies, Sally and Lydia. When Thomas, his second son, was twenty-one, his father gave him the farm and mill, now known as the Hayward Place, near Mr. Damon’s factory. He lived, there a long time, and kept bachelor’s hall, then married his third cousin, Prudence Hosmer. Joseph, his eldest son, was born there. When he was eight years old his father exchanged farms with Mr. Hayward, and removed to a house standing where the cottage now stands. He purchased, also, the farm belonging to Joseph Shevally, a Frenchman, who married his cousin, Sarah Hosmer. When Joseph was twenty-one, his father divided his farm between his two sons, Joseph and Benjamin. Joseph built the house in which Mrs. Cyrus Hosmer now lives, when he was twenty-three years old. Robert Rosier, a Frenchman, married Mary Shevally, and lived near the bridge. He afterwards removed to Albany. He was a very excel- lent cabinet maker, and Major Hosmer learned his trade from him. Having finished his house, he commenced house- keeping ; his apprentices boarded with him ; his sister Dinah managed affairs in-doors. He was married, at the age of twenty-five, on Christmas Eve, 1761, to Lucy Barnes, of Marlboro’. Tradition says that he went to M. to take home a load of furniture which had been made to the order of Mr. Jonathan Barnes, a wealthy farmer, town clerk, town treas- urer, representative to the general court, and altogether a man of note. A: thunder shower came on, and when it had passed over, Mr. Hosmer rose to go. ‘‘ Do not go to-night ; please make him stay, father ; it is raining still, and Concord woods are very dark.” So spoke Miss Lucy. He stayed, and came again ; but when he asked for Lucy, the answer came to this effect: ‘‘ Concord plains are sandy ; Concord soil is poor; you have miserable farms there, and no fruit. There is little hope that you will ever do better than your father, for you have both farm and shop to attend to, and two trades spoil one. Lucy shall marry her cousin John ; he owns the best farm in Marlboro’, and you must marry a Concord 116 MEMOIR. girl, who cannot tell good land from poor. As for Lucy, you must forget her.” Two years passed away. Mr. Hosmer went again to Marlboro’ with another load of furniture, — this time for cousin John: Lucy refused John, and he mar- ried another cousin. So Joseph married Lucy, and the month of December that year was so pleasant that late flowers were still in blossom on the fifteenth day of the month. From that time until the breaking out of the Revolution he con- tinued busily working at his trade and managing also a large farm. Cherry and mahogany were the kinds of wood he used, to judge from the receipts for furniture in his desk. His wife must have received from her father’s estate a farm, not long, I think, before the war commenced, which he had the charge of for many years. He must also, I think, have sold many cattle, from the fact that in Rutland, in New Ips- wich, in Princeton, in Acton, he owned pastures. But the time was coming when public duties were to claim his attention. He made his maiden speech in the old church a few weeks before the memorable roth of April. A con- vention met at Concord, and Mr. Bliss made a very eloquent speech, ridiculing the proceedings of the Sons of Liberty, redolent of wit and pungent sarcasm. It is said to have been so impressive, that there was perfect silence for a long time after he ceased to speak. From the opposite corner a man rose, plainly dressed in a suit of “butternut brown.” He commenced slowly and hesitatingly, but in a few mo- ments his timidity vanished, and, in the language of Shat- tuck’s history, “he replied to Mr. Bliss in a strain of natural, unaffected eloquence, for which he was ever afterward distin- guished, which at once attracted public attention and intro- duced him to public favor.” A Worcester lawyer, standing near Mr. Bliss, saw that he frowned, bit his lip, pounded with his boot-heel, and, in a word, showed marked discomposure. “ Who is this man?” “Hosmer, a mechanic,” was the an- swer. ‘Then how comes he to speak such pure English?” “ Because he has an old mother who sits in the chimney FOSEPH HOSMER. 117 corner and reads English poetry all the day long ; and I sup- pose it is ‘like mother like son.’ He is the most dangerous man in Concord. His influence over the young men is won- derful, and where he leads they will be sure to follow.” The 19th of April came; he acted that day as adjutant,. and Lossing, in his “ Field Book of the Revolution,” says he made alittle speech at the old North Bridge. While he was absent, British soldiers visited his house, but did not : discover any stores, although a quantity were hidden there. Hanging on the wall was a little red morocco hat with a black feather tipped with red. The soldiers thought it had.a rebellious appearance, and voted to burn it, but the mother pleaded that it belonged to little Cyrus, only ten years old, and it was spared; but, after the soldiers were gone, the mother missed her little son. His aunt and sis- ter went in search of him ; they overtook him on his way to town. He was bare-headed, and crying bitterly. He said he knew, his uncle Ben was dead, and he was going up to the bridge to see. He was brought home with difficulty, and listened to the danger his hat had been in with indifference, merely remarking that if uncle Ben was killed, he should never wear any hat again. The shout of joy with which the little fellow welcomed uncle Ben the next morning, on his return from Charlestown, was long remembered in the fam- ily. At the commencement of the war, Major Hosmer was offered a colonel’s commission. He modestly refused it, saying, he believed he could do the country more good by working at home for the army than by going to the war. The records at the State House show, it is said, how ear- nest and indefatigable a worker he was. He was quarter- master, and rode over the State to collect supplies. The old desk contained receipts dated at the War Office, given to Joseph Hosmer, collector of public stores, which, aside from the date, might have been written yesterday. He was accus- tomed to ride from town to town tocollect supplies, and often made little speeches, and, as he brought the latest news from 118 MEMOIR. the War Department, the people were always glad to hear him. He is said to have made witty and humorous speeches ; and, like President Lincoln, delighted in story-telling. He was muster-master, and it seems to have been his duty to pay bounties and collect recruits. He was the first captain of the Concord Light Infantry. He was also agent of absen- tees’ estates. He filled the post of collector of public sup- plies without fee or reward, simply, as he said, because it was somebody’s duty to do so, and he might as well as an- other man. The manner of collecting stores varied a little from the custom of to-day. Old Mr. Barnes, of Berlin, a nephew of Major Hosmer’s, told me, some fifteen years ago, that he re- membered, when a child, to have been roused from sleep by a tremendous knocking. His father called out, ‘ Who is there?”” “Don’t you know me, uncle?” was the reply. It was Cyrus Hosmer, a boy of fifteen, on his way to the Con- necticut River towns, to tell them to hurry up supplies. “What brings you here, child, at two in the morning?” The answer came promptly, ‘Father is in Boston ; he sent a special messenger up to mother to tell her to send’ me off. It was eleven when he arrived, so I started by moonlight.” The narrator went on to say it was acommon thing to be roused in the middle of the night by Uncle Joseph, but Cyrus was such a boy, we did not expect him. , After the Revolution, the major was in public life for many years. He was state representative five years, senator thir- teen, and high sheriff fifteen. He retained his powers of body and mind to a great age. His nephew came to Con- cord last summer. He said that he remembered to have seen him on horseback at Lunenburg when he was nearly eighty years of age. He loved to hear old soldiers talk about the war. Major Paine kept the Middlesex Hotel. He had held a captain’s commission, and commanded a company from Milton, was at the battle of White Plains, at Monmouth, and at Morris- FOSEPH HOSMER. 119 town during the hard winter. If any soldier strayed to Con- cord, he was made quite welcome to all the Jarder and the bar afforded. It was his custom to send for Major Hosmer to come down and listen, and sometimes, if the stories were very large, Dr. Ripley and Dr. Cuming came also. Major Paine’s eldest daughter used to say, “‘ Father, don’t send for Major Hosmer ; if you do, they will never go away.” He possessed in a remarkable degree the power of attract- ing all ages and classes, while his gentle dignity commanded respect ; his sweetness of temper and urbanity of manner won the affection of all around him. He had a sincere and cheerful piety consonant to his character, and I believe the last words he spoke were addressed to his beloved daughter- in-law, whom he tenderly loved, “ Patty, surely goodness and mercy have followed us all the days of our lives, and we will dwell in the house of our God forever.” He died on the r4th of January, 1821. The “ Columbian Centinel” of that week said, “This venerable man, during the Jast fifty years, has sustained some of the most important offices in the State. He was exceeded in strength of mind by few, in integrity by none.” Dr. Ripley preached a funeral sermon ; it is in the house, but I cannot find it. I remember that he compared him “to David, who was a man after God’s own heart,” and “ to Cin- cinnatus at the plow.” He spoke of him with much af- fection, and I recollect to have heard Miss Mary Emer- son say, “that he loved him as a brother,” and so “ full of years and honors, he fell asleep and was gathered to his fathers.” The Hosmer family are not a migratory family. Major Hosmer used to say, that there were Hosmers in Kent be- fore the Conquest, and from Hockhurst, in Kent, they came to Concord. The James, who came to Concord, married Mary Willard, sister of Major Simon Willard; came with him to Cambridge in 1632, from thence to Concord. Major Willard came also from Kent. November 9, 1869 . 120 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF THOMAS HUBBARD. BY SAMUEL HOAR. Thomas Hubbard was born in Concord on the 16th of July, 1766. He was the son of Captain Thomas Hubbard, who died on the rath of October, 1810, aged eighty years. The latter was the son of Captain Joseph Hubbard, who died on the 1oth of April, 1768, aged eighty years. Joseph was the son of Jonathan Hubbard, who died 17th July, 1728, aged seventy years. They were all natives of Concord, ex- cepting Jonathan. When he or his ancestors came from England has not been ascertained, but it is said that he was in this town as early as 1680. _ The subject of this memoir was born, and continued his residence through life, on the farm now owned and occupied by his son Cyrus Hubbard, and by his grandchildren. His early life was occupied in a manner quite common to the country boys of New England, in the performance of such labor as was. within his capacity on the farm, excepting a small part of the cold season, when he attended such schools as the town then provided. The studies of the common schools were then generally limited to reading, spelling, writ- ing, and arithmetic. Either at these schools, or subse- quently to leaving them, he acquired such a knowledge of these branches of education as to enable him to perform reputably his public and private duties. But he was never satisfied with present attainments. Progress was his con- stant aim and endeavor through life. On the 28th of May, 1789, he was married to Rebecca Wheeler, of Concord, who was the mother of all his children. She died on the 26th of October, 1803, aged thirty-four. On the 14th of June, 1804, he was married to Rebecca THOMAS HUBBARD. 121 Prescott, of Concord, with whom he lived until his decease; and who survived him several years. The common occupation of Mr. Hubbard was farming. In the pursuit of this business he was very industrious, and managed his farm in a very exemplary manner. A maxim often repeated by him was, “whatever is worth doing is worth doing well.” This he made a-practical rule. He often tried experiments in agriculture and in the use of new implements. If the experiment or the implement failed to answer his hopes, though it might have been expensive, he said, “Well, it is better to use money so, than to spend it for new rum.” His observance of order and method in his business was very apparent in the neatness of his buildings and farm, and in its results in affording him time, nearly every day of his life after he became a man, for some read- ing. He remarked that he considered it the duty of every man to acquaint himself well with his own profession or business, whatever it might be, and to learn faithfully the re- ligious and moral rules and principles necessary as the guide of life, if he cow/d learn nothing else. After this if he could extend his inquiries further, he should do it. He kept, for many years, a diary, in which he noted his business for the day, deaths, state of the weather, and other remarkable events. On Sundays he noted the name of the preacher at his usual place of public worship, and his own attendance or failure to attend the services. It is believed that he owned the frst, and for many years the ov/y, barometer in Con- cord. He was always temperate in his habits, and was an early and decided friend to the efforts made for a temperance re- form, for many years before his death, wholly banishing in- toxicating liquors as a beverage from his house and farm. He was strongly attached to his home and to agricultural pursuits. When called to the discharge of public duties he commonly accepted the call for a time, if the duties were to be performed in Concord, or in the immediate neighborhood ; 122 MEMOIR. but seemed much more pleased to be released from public duty than to be chosen or appointed to a public office. He was one of the selectmen from 1801 to 1803, and was often on important town committees. When the political parties in Concord were nearly equally divided, the Federalists, to which party he belonged, supposing that respect for his char- acter was so general that he would receive more votes than any other person whom they could designate as a candidate for representative to the legislature from this town, solicited him to permit them to vote for him. He, however, promptly declined, saying that he should feel as much out of his ele ment in the legislature as,a fish out of water. " He made a public profession of the Christian religion, and joined the church in Concord, under Dr. Ripley’s care, on the 2oth of June, 1810. On the 30th of April, 1812, he was chosen a deacon of the church, which office he accepted and held until his death. Profession and practice were as nearly coincident in Dea- con Hubbard’as in almost any human‘ being. During his whole life he as well exemplified the best traits in the Puri- tan character, tempered but not adulterated by modern im- provements, as could easily be found. His guileless conver- sation seemed like bluntness ; seldom, if ever, offensive, but often noticeable. The tinsel of fashion he did not assume, yet was always ready to adopt a change; if on full examina- tion a sufficient reason for the change was found. He was habitually cheerful, fond of anecdote, and interested in what- ever concerns the welfare: of human beings. Valuing prop- erty highly, and economical in the use of it, one of his chief pleasures seemed to be to relieve the needy and assist the deserving. Though firmly attached to the doctrines of his patticular denomination, he was very tolerant in his feelings and conduct toward those whose speculations differed from his own. Without brilliancy of genius, and with no preten- sions to profound erudition, few men have better merited the title of Christian philosopher. THOMAS HUBBARD. 123 Deacon Hubbard died on the 18th of December, 1835, in the seventieth year of his age, and with almost his last breath commended his wife to the filial care of his oldest son. He had six children, five of whom survived him. December 19, 1854. 124 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF JOSEPH HUNT. BY WILLIAM WHITING. Dr. Joseph Hunt was born March 1, 1749. He was the youngest son of Deacon Simon Hunt, of this town. He was a graduate of Harvard University in 1770. He studied his profession, I believe, with the celebrated Dr. Cuming, of this town, after which he commenced the practice of medi- cine in Dracut, in this county, and remained there until his situation became somewhat uncomfortable, on account of an unfortunate accident which happened to him, namely, being caught in the act of robbing a grave of a dead body, for the purpose of dissection. I am informed he was compelled, by the friends of the deceased, publicly to reinter the body, follow it as chief mourner to the grave, go down upon his bended knees, and ask pardon of the relatives for his trans- gression. He afterwards removed to Concord, and kept the town school for two and a half years, commencing in 1786. He was president of the Fire Society between 1795 and 1800. At the erection of the new school-house in 1799, the first school committee was chosen, consisting of five members, among whom we find the name of Dr. Hunt. On their rec- ommendation the town adopted a uniform system of school regulations, which are distinguished for enlightened views of education, and which, by being generally followed since, under some modifications, have rendered our schools among our greatest blessings. Dr. Hunt was celebrated for his excellent penmanship. He was the teacher of the late Dr. Abiel Heywood, whose FOSEPH HUNT. 125 writing is universally admired. He was the writer of the Constitution of the Social Circle, of which, I believe, he was one of the original members, and was the first secretary chosen after the Circle was organized in its present form, the record beginning the rst of December, 1795, and he retained the office, I believe, for three years. He was for several years secretary of the Massachusetts Medical So- ciety. He married. (I do not know the year) Lucy, the youngest daughter of Thomas Whiting, Esq., of this town, by whom he had three sons, Henry, Joseph, and Thomas. Owing to ill health, he was obliged to quit the practice of medicine, and opened an apothecary shop which afforded a comfortable and genteel support as long as he lived. He died May 27, 1812, in the sixty-third year of his age. Dr. Hunt, when young, was like most other boys of his age, full of roguish tricks ; and it may be well to give a spec. imen of the kind of roguery to which I allude. Once, when his parents were absent from home, he, with his elder brothers, took a fancy to indulge in a feast of poached eggs. They had the misfortune to melt the pewter basin in which it was prepared. A sister, who was a spec- tator, threatened to tell how and by whom it was done. The brothers thought to deter her by threatening to put her in the bacon basket, and to draw her up into the great kitchen chimney, where the old gentleman used to smoke hams, unless she would promise not to expose them ; but, nothing daunted, she still persisted, and was drawn up as high as the pulleys would allow, and after keeping her in that uncomfortable sit- uation as long as they dared, they again inquired if she would promise not to tell; she still refused to promise, and they were obliged to let her down and abide the consequences ; and from what we know of the ancient method of training up children in the way they should go, we can readily imagine what followed. Dr. Hunt was personally known to the writer of this 126: MEMOIR. memoir for quite a number of years before his death. He was an upright man in all his dealings, exceedingly close and exact, small in stature, and not gifted by nature with any ex- traordinary abilities ; but what he ad possess he cultivated to the best advantage, and was considered a good citizen, an excellent husband, and a respectable man. : His wife, whom he dearly loved, lived quite a number of years after his death. She had the whole income of his property, which was ample, for her support during her life- time. She was a lady much beloved by all who enjoyed the privilege of being intimately acquainted with her. February 26, 1856. DUNCAN INGRAHAM. 127 DUNCAN INGRAHAM. BY JOSIAH BARTLETT, M. D. The name of Duncan Ingraham stands second on the list of original members of the Social Circle. How early he came to Concord I have not been able tolearn. He was then a widower, having a large family of sons and daugh- ters. Joseph, his eldest, went to the Northwest Coast, and wrote an interesting journal. Duncan, Jr., was a sailor, and died in the West Indies. Nathaniel lived a while in Wa- tertown, and afterward removed to Charleston, S.C. A son of his was the Captain Ingraham who not long since was so much extolled for his gallant conduct in the case of Kosta, to whom he insisted upon extending the right of an Ameri- can citizen, and protecting him as such. So popular was this measure, that even the working classes of England have united to present to him a valuable chronometer. It bears the following inscription: ‘‘ Presented to Capt. Ingraham, of the U. S. Navy, by some thousands of the British work- ing classes, for his noble conduct in rescuing Martin Kosta, the Hungarian refugee, from the Austrian authorities, April, 1854.” One of the daughters married a Mr. Condy, an Epis- copalian clergyman. Her oldest child was the wife of Jo. Selfridge, who was tried for his life for killing young Austin, in the street in Boston. Another daughter of Ingraham’s married Fred. Geyer, an Englishman, a merchant in Boston, who caused the imprisonment of the notorious Dr. Ezekiel Brown, who by his loquacity and folly was the means of breaking up the first Social Club. Brown had failed, and was deeply indebted to Geyer. A daughter of Geyer was 128 MEMOIR. married in England, and was the mother of Captain Marryat, the novelist, who wrote one of his works at Bellows Falls, while staying?at the house of one of the family, which is still held by the Geyers. Mr. Ingraham, for his second wife, married the widow of Tilly Merrick, and lived in her house (now occupied by Mrs. Phineas How) while she lived. He then removed to the one now occupied by Francis Potter. For years before he had been a sea captain, engaged in the Surinam trade, and was also engaged in mercantile affairs in Boston, which consisted in slave dealing, in part, at least. He spent some time in France, and John Adams, in his Diary, speaks of him as his associate in Paris. On coming to Concord he appears to have relinquished business, having a competency. He was intimate with the prominent political leaders of the vicinity, yet from taste and early association he was inclined to tory- ism, for his wife, in her diary, considers it a cause of humil- iation that some evil-disposed persons should have hung upon the back of their new chaise a sheep’s head and pluck, as they were riding through the streets, as a mark of their disapprobation of his political views. Also, Mr. Samuel Hubbard related before his death that, together with twenty or thirty other rogues, he, with tin pans and cracked instru- ments, one evening honored Ingraham, who was entertaining British officers at his house. These views gradually changed as the hopes of the rebels brightened, for in a letter of Nathan Bond, who was his clerk, to Tilly Merrick, the son of Ingra- ham’s wife, dated Boston, April 21, 1782, he says: ‘Since the capture of Cornwallis toryism has ended ; not one word have I heard dropped from the mouth of man since; even the old man (referring to D. I.) talks of the independence of his country.” And in another letter of September 6, 1782, speaking of the French men-of-war in Boston Harbor, and the friendly intercourse subsisting between the inhabitants and the French, says: “ The tories court their acquaintance, DUNCAN INGRAHAM. 129 and, what is stranger still, the old man is this day gone on board to eat soup and garlic.” Mr. Ingraham’s life while here was by no means irre- proachable. He affected state, and was fond of display, as evinced in the richly cushioned and lined pew in the church, which, though sadly dilapidated, may still be remembered by our oldest members, Also, by his fondness for high com- pany, entertaining distinguished guests, and never happier than when Governor Hancock was his guest and occupied his pew. His expensive suppers for a time suspended the club, and came very near breaking it up entirely. His speech was bold and peremptory, occasionally inter- larded with the oaths of the sailor. On one occasion he was called into court to testify as to the credibility of a witness for truth and veracity. Others had shrunk from giving a de- cided opinion, for fear of giving offense. On being ques- tioned, he boldly answered, ‘that the man was the damndest liar on God’s footstool.” He was chosen representative for Concord from 1788 to ’g1, and acted on many important committees upon town af- fairs. Among others, he carried the protest of the people of Concord in the Shays’ affair to the governor, for his appro- bation, on Sunday, September 10, 1786. On account of the critical state of affairs the governor and council met on that day. He left the club in 1795. His second wife having died, he married for his third the widow of Dr. Tufts, of Medford, and that year removed to her house, where he died on August 9, 1811, aged eighty-eight years. Cato was his slave. On his desiring to marry, his master consented, on condition of his no longer depending upon him for support, to which he agreed. In process of time Cato goes to Medford, asking his master “when he is coming to Concord, for he is out of meal, meat, and wood, and can stand it no longer.” His master reminded him of his ayree- ment. ‘I don't want to hear any more about that; I tell you I am out of everything.’? Whether his wants were supplied I 9 130 MEMOIR. know not. I find in Dr. Ripley’s record that Cato Ingraham died of consumption, August 24, 1805, aged fifty-four years.} Movember 20, 1857. 1 Andraxisse, an old Dutch commodore, died in Medford leaving fif- teen or twenty Malay slaves. One of them, Caesar, was master of the tailor’s trade, a great favorite with the Medford people, was sold to Na- thaniel Ingraham and carried South. Six years afterwards, on coming home to see his aged father, he brought Czsar with him, who, preferring the freedom of the North over all the blessings he had enjoyed at the South, thought best to escape. He was apprehended in Woburn, and, closely buckled in a chaise, was carried on board ship in Boston Harbor. On crossing the bridge in Medford Cesar roared lustily, and aroused Wait, the blacksmith, who, seizing the horse by the head, doubling his fist, sternly forbade Ingraham to carry a man from freedom to slavery. In spite of this interruption he was carried on board. Wait, with others, the most influential men in town, proceeded to the harbor and brought Ceesar off in triumph. Redress by law was tried in vain; Cesar for many years after was 9 tailor in Medford, and having changed his name to Anderson, removed to Woburn, where he died. ELNATHAN JONES. 131 MEMOIR OF ELNATHAN JONES. BY DR. J. BARTLETT AND DEACON ELIJAH WOOD. Elnathan Jones was one of the four recorded as belonging to the first formation of the Circle, but on its reorganization in 1794 he was no longer living. He was a merchant of ir- reproachable character, given to hospitality, and addicted to display. He built and lived in the house now occupied by Mr. Prichard. His store was attached to the house, and years afterwards was removed to the spot on which the town house now stands. It now constitutes a part of the house of Sheriff Keyes. He had visited England, acquired property, and lived here in considerable state. An anecdote is related of him that, like most rich men, he bitterly complained of his taxes before the board of assessors. One of them in pity re- marked, “Mr. Jones is rather poor; suppose we in part abate them?” He quickly resented it, remarking, “ Not so damned poor either.” He married the sister of Deacon Minot, who, after his death, was again married to Mr. Field, of Enfield. He had seven children, none of them remaining in Concord. He was town treasurer from 1786 to’91. His taste for display led him to compete with Duncan Ingraham, who had the same passion, in giving expensive suppers, which resulted in the temporary breaking up of the Circle. He died of paral- ysis on the 27th of February, 1793, aged fifty-six years, bear- ing the character of a respectable gentleman. October, 1860. 132 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF EPHRAIM JONES. BY DR. JOSIAH BARTLETT AND DEACON ELIJAH WOOD. Mr. Ephraim Jones was a member of the club on its reor- ganization in 1794. He was the son of Captain Ephraim Jones, who kept the tavern afterwards designated as the Bigelow tavern, and had the care of the jail near by. On the 19th of April, 1775, knowing that Henry Gardner, Esq., boarded in this tavern during the session of Congress, and had left in Jones’s custody a trunk containing money and important papers, the British caused the arrest of Captain Jones, and had him placed under a guard of five men, their bayonets fixed and pointing towards him. After being de- layed a short time, he was released to furnish refreshment at his bar. By a stratagem the trunk was kept from the sol- diers. His son, Ephraim, Jr., followed his father’s voca- tion, besides keeping a store quite near the house, which was afterward kept by Phineas How. He married Susan Phillips of the Hayden place in Lincoln. His wife was a woman of great energy of character, and was the head of the house. They had but one child, Susan, who is now the wife of James Dalton, of Boston. Mr. Jones was a quiet, unobtrusive man, possessing but little energy, never successful, but always respectable. He left the Circle in 1805. About this time he removed to Bos- ton, and kept a boarding-house in Pearl Street, in the house of Josiah Quincy. Here, for a time, he did better, but his wife died, he became discouraged, and at last, about 1840, died in the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. October, 1860. SAMUEL ONES. 133 MEMOIR OF SAMUEL JONES. BY DR. JOSIAH BARTLETT AND DEACON ELIJAH WOOD. Captain Samuel Jones was a member of the Circle on its reorganization in 1794. He was a blacksmith, and lived in the house opposite Rev. Mr. Frost’s. His shop was close by, between the two beautiful trees on Mr. Cheney’s land ; the remains of his cinders lie there still. He was a respectable gentleman, possessing the esteem of all. He married the sister of Ephraim Jones, who, after his death, became the wife of Colonel Roger Brown. Mr. Jones left one only son, who, after graduating at Harvard in 1793, mar- ried the daughter of Reuben Brown, and removed to Maine. He became quite distinguished, being clerk of the courts in Somerset County, and a brigadier-general in the militia of the State. He died at Norridgewock, January 10, 1813, and was brought to Concord for burial. Mr. Jones was one day applied to by a traveler for work. “You seem to be quite lame?” “Yes,” says the man, “T?ve had a stone in the heel of my shoe ever since morn- ing, and I can hardly walk now.” “You may go,” said Jones ; “you won’t answer for me.” He had a woman living with him who always refused a drink of the toddy which he mixed twice a day. At one time he had a quantity of cherries, and bought five gal- lons of spirit to make cherry rum. During the winter he invited his friends to taste it. He put a spile in the cen- tre; it would not run. He tried again lower down, and with all his efforts could get but just enough to give them a drink apiece. He suspected foul play by the woman, and 134 MEMOIR. soon became satisfied of the fact, and he vowed that from that time to the day of his death he would never trust any one who would not drink his toddy whenever it was mixed. Mr. Jones was town treasurer from 1796 to1810. Hedied May 6, 1812, of a fever, aged seventy-two years. October, 1860. FONAS LEE. 135 MEMOIR OF JONAS LEE. BY JOHN S, KEYES. Jonas Lee, one of the earliest members of the Circle, was born October 16, 1745, on the Lee farm (so called) in Con- cord, in the old house, which was built in 1639, probably the first on the west bank of the river. He was the second son of Dr. Joseph Lee and Ruth (Jones) Lee, who had seven children, three of whom graduated at Harvard College. Dr. Lee was a man of property and consideration until the Rev- olution broke out, when he espoused the cause of the King. His family had been prominent in town many years, and he had possessed great influence, till he ruined himself by his toryism. The Committee of Safety, out of which this Circle is said to have originated, did not consider it safe to allow such a man as Dr. Lee to be at large, and he was confined by their order to the bounds of his farm, for more than a year after the war began. This confinement proved his safety, as he was so unpopular that his life would have been in danger if he had left home. Indeed, the bullet holes in the door casings of the old mansion were said to have been made by the firing at the doctor when he had shown himself to some excited patriot on the way from ‘‘training,” but whose aim was not so deadly as his intent. But if the father sided with the king, the son took the part of the rebels, and loved his country more than king or sire. Jonas was as warmly a friend to liberty as his father to the crown, and had influence enough in the councils of the whigs to save him from outrage, and protect his per- son and property. Whether Jonas was in arms at the North Bridge, April 19, 1775, I have not ascertained ; but 136 ' MEMOIR. from his age, pursuits, and active sympathy with the cause, it is probable that he belonged to one of the compa- nies of minute-men. He was brought up as a farmer, and followed that occupation all his life. After the war he had considerable share in public affairs. He was a delegate to a county convention in 1786 to consult about prices cur- rent, and in 1787 he was on a committee of the town to pre- pare instructions to the representative, as was then very much the fashion of the day. He never held any of the more prominent town offices, except representative, to which position he was three times elected, in 1806, 1808, and 1814. Judging from this and other facts in his life, he was not a man of much power, though he possessed considerable per- sonal popularity. In the close contests between the federal- ists and democrats, during the war of 1812, he was a leader of the democratic party in the, town, and to this owed his last election to the House of Representatives. He was fre- quently defeated as a candidate for the same place, and with Tilly Merrick, Esq., used to lead off the political parties whenever there was a poll of the house at town meetings. These meetings were held in the old court-house, and the democrats, headed by Jonas Lee, and the federalists by Tilly Merrick, would march out in single file and parallel columns, extending across the street, when they had, after a hot fight, come to a division. So equally balanced were the two par- ties at that time, that first one and then the other would be successful by a single vote. But if Mr, Lee never accomplished much in the political world or public affairs, he was by no means a cipher in fam- ily and social matters. He was married not less than three times, and, perhaps, four. Widow Cordis, Widow Abbott, and Widow Colburn, successively passed under his hands, and the last survived him. He seems to have been a soft- hearted, quick-tempered, nervous man; would swear when vexed, and, in his later years, had many a pretty quarrel with his last wife. Some of the stories still current of her shrew- FONAS LEE, 137 ishness and his petulance are very amusing. One of these is to the effect, that, when building the east addition to his house, Mr. Lee and his wife differed as to the place where the chimney should stand. He directed the mason to build it in the side, she in the corner, of the room. They argued, scolded, and raved about it till the mason got out of pa- tience, and began laying the bricks as Mr. Lee directed. Mrs. Lee started up and kicked over the bricks as fast as laid. The mason kept on laying, the woman kicking, and Jonas swearing, till all were exhausted. The mason picked up his tools and left. Jonas took up his wife, and carried her off in hysterics, and where and how that chimney was built my informant did not know, — but there is one stand- ing in the east room of the house at this date. This was the house under the hill, now owned and occu- pied by Charles B. Davis, and Mr. Lee, being a man of considerable property, lived well, and in good style. He had several children by his wife, Mrs. Cordis ; a son, Samuel Cordis Lee, and several daughters, of whom but one lived to be married to Nathaniel Monroe, of Baltimore. Socially disposed, Mr. Lee was always an active member of the Cir- cle, and his name appears more than once upon the records. He was a great talker, and though impulsive to a fault, had judgment and discretion beyond what is usually found in such men. Somewhat wild in his youth, in the laxity of morals and principles that the Revolutionary war engen- dered, he sobered down sufficiently in after life to make a respectable, clever man, of whom this is an imperfect sketch. He died at Ashby, April 2, 1819. March 17, 1857. 138 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF PETER WHEELER. BY CYRUS STOW. Peter Wheeler was born April 24, 1755, and was the son of Timothy, commonly called “Pond Tim,” and May, his wife. His father lived in the house now owned by Nathan B. Stow, which has been since enlarged and altered. “ Pond Tim” was a farmer and miller, and is noted in history for the adroit manner in which he succeeded in saving from de- struction a part of the public stores in this town on the 19th of April, 1775. See Shattuck’s “ History of Concord,” page 107. He died in 1796, leaving a handsome estate to his son. Peter Wheeler married Phebe Brooks, of Lincoln, and when first married, lived in the house, then new, which is now owned by Cyrus Stow, and which has since been re- modeled. After his father’s death he went back to the old house. In person Mr. Wheeler was of middle size and of light complexion, usually appearing as if in deep study, but at times conversing freely on business matters, his plans, and speculations ; he often indulged in humorous remarks, had a visionary turn of mind, was always ready for any new pro- ject, and believed that everything was foreordained as to the concerns of men, some being born to grow rich and pros- per, while others were to struggle in vain against poverty. In the early part of his career he assisted in establishing many persons in trade, and in this way became connected with a large number of stores in various parts of the country. For several years, toward the close of his life, he owned some three hundred acres of land in Concord and Lincoln, kept a store and tavern, carried on the butchering business, bar- PETER WHEELER. 139 reled large quantities of beef and pork, manufactured soap and candles, employed agents to purchase cattle and swine, and, in addition, carried on his farm. In this way he em- ployed a large number of hands, butchering, packing, mak- ing soap and candles, besides paying out a considerable amount to the farmers for transporting his eet and pork to Boston, and fetching back salt. The men in his employ were of every shade of character, good, bad, and indifferent. Among them was one Nathan Barnes, who came from Vermont with a drover. When they arrived in this town Mr. Wheeler bought the whole drove of cattle, and hired Barnes. He was a profane, uncouth, disa- greeable fellow, and was employed chiefly in collecting grease and ashes. He used to go about with his wagon dressed in jacket and trousers of sheep-skin, and from his strange appearance and coarse manners went by the name of “Peter Wheeler’s devil,” a title in which he took considerable pride, and to which he did fair credit. He came-back to Concord a few years ago, and claimed support from the town, stating that he has lived here some ten or twelve years. It did not appear that he had ever been taxed here but for four years, and being told that he had no settle- ment in Concord, he exclaimed, “ Where am I to go?” Be- ing furnished with a few dollars he took the railroad cars, and has never been heard of since, though there can be little doubt of the place of his ultimate destination. Probably no man ever lived in Concord who carried on such a multiplicity of business as Peter Wheeler, but owing to rash adventures, the embargo, and placing too much con- fidence in others, he became embarrassed with debts. He, it is said, at one time opened a flue, communicating from a smal] box in the bar-room to the outside of the house, in which he directed the officers to drop any writs they might have against him ; and being once confined to the jail limits, extending round the then mill-pond, he could just go to the front win- dows of his house, where he would converse with his wife, 140 MEMOIR. and give directions to his men about their work. This was a few years previous to his death. When his affairs were most embarrassed, and an accumulation of debts ;pressed upon him, he still maintained his cheerful spirits, and never de- sponded of retrieving his fortunes. This, however, was not his destiny, as has been already stated. Peter’s father met at one time with quite a number of losses, and, among others, that of a cow, which he had let out toone E. M—~—, a poor, dissolute fellow, who, being short of funds, sold her. When “ Pond Tim ” heard of this, and found it was true, he exclaimed to his son, ‘ Peter, go and get a gallon of rum, that we may enjoy ourselves while it lasts, for the property is all going to destruction.” A good many anecdotes are told of Peter, some of which are amusing, and perhaps are worth repeating. Soon after the commencement of his pecuniary difficulties, two of the lawyers then in town, John L, Tuttle and Thomas Heald, who were not men of great means themselves, used to buy up Peter’s notes at a,discount on speculation, and then pro- ceed to collect them. They found this for a while a profit able business, and monopolized the market. After a while, however, as his affairs grew worse his notes grew gradually larger and Messrs. T. & H., his considerate neighbors, lacked the means to purchase them. This was a great grat- ification to Peter, and he used to take considerable pride and comfort in the fact, that his notes had become so large that the lawyers could n’t buy them up. In commenting once on the faculty some men had of ac- cumulating property, he wound up by declaring that he verily believed Jonathan Davis could live on arock in the middle of the ocean, and make money there. When asked how, he said, ‘‘ By drilling out whetstones and collecting moss!” Mr. Wheeler once had a most ferocious bull to kill. He and his men succeeded with some difficulty in getting the animal into his slaughter-house. They were afraid, however, to go in and encounter his.fury, and, while outside conferring upon PETER WHEELER. I4I the safest mode of proceeding, Brister Freeman, the celebrated negro, happened along, Wheeler, giving his men the wink, inquired very affectionately after Brister’s health, and told him if he would go into the slaughter-house and get an axe, he should have a little job todo. Brister never suspected mischief, at once opened the door and walked in, when it was quietly shut upon him, and the appalled negro found himself face to face with the enraged bull. It was already a ‘“‘case of fight or die,’’ and after sundry minuets about the house, the celerity of which would have established even a French danc- ing-master, Brister fortunately spied the axe he had been sent in for, and, seizing it, commenced belaboring his adversary, giving him a blow here and there as he had opportunity. All this while stood Peter and his men watching through the dry knot-holes the valiant exploits of Brister, and cheering him on with the most encouraging roars of laughter. Fortune at length decided in favor of the negro; he laid the bull dead upon the floor, and casting down his weapon of fight, came forth unharmed. But imagine the amazement of his tor- mentors when at length he emerged, no longer the dim, som- bre negro he was when he entered, but literally white with terror, and what was once his wool, standing up straight like so many pokers, they could hardly persuade themselves to believe it was Brister; but without waiting for them to iden- tify him, or receive their congratulations for the notable manner in which he had sustained himself, the affrighted and indignant negro turned his back upon them and departed. Mr. Wheeler was a sergeant in a volunteer company of sixty-three men in 1777, who enlisted from Concord, Lin- coln, and Acton, and were commanded by John Buttrick, of Concord. ‘They marched to Saratoga, and were present at the capitulation of Burgoyne and his army. As has been already mentioned, Mr. Wheeler married Phebe Brooks, of Lincoln. They had four children, namely, Peter, who was born September 26, 1789 ; Phebe, born July 26, 1792 ; William, born January 1, 1795 ; and Timothy Au- 142 MEMOIR. gustus, born April 1, 1806. The eldest son, Peter, died of a fever while at sea, September 22, 1811, aged twenty-two years ; William died a few years after his father ; Timothy Augustus died at Fitchburg, of a fever, about the year 1846 ; Phebe, who was never married, died in 1849. Although Mr. Wheeler died insolvent, his widow held dower in his large real estate, and was thus left comfortably off through life. She was a most worthy woman, and her children all maintained most excellent characters. She moved from Concord to Fitchburg with her daughter in 1841, and lived there with her son Timothy Augustus. The deaths of her children have been already given. Mr. Wheeler him- self died May 12, 1813, from a fallfrom a cart. Mrs. Wheeler died in 1847; and there is now but one descendant living, Charles, a son of Timothy Augustus, who is some twelve or fifteen years of age, and resides with his mother at Fitch- burg. Mr. Wheeler joined the Social Circle in 1794, and re- mained a member till death, He was a good townsman and neighbor, and an honest man. February, 1857. FOHN WHITE. 143 MEMOIR OF JOHN WHITE. BY DANIEL SHATTUCK, John White was born in Acton, January 23, 1749. He was the sixth son of Deacon Mark White, who had by his first wife eight children, and ten by his second wife. He was married, November 11, 1778, to Esther Kettell, of Charles- town, by whom he had two children, to wit, Betsey Vose, born June 21,1784, who was married to Rev. Joseph Chickering, of Woburn, the father of Rev. John W. Chickering, now a distinguished clergyman of Portland. His only son John was born December 2, 1787, graduated at Cambridge in 1805, studied with his brother-in-law, Mr. Chickering, a short time, and finished his theological studies at Cambridge, after which he was settled in Dedham, April 20, 1814, where he was highly esteemed for his many Christian virtues. After the decease of his first wife, Deacon White married Deborah, widow of Caleb Hayward, of Weymouth, and daughter of James White, of the same town. He was one of the earliest members of the Social Circle, was a constant attendant at its meetings, and took a lively interest in all matters for the promotion of the civil, moral, and religious welfare of the Gommunity. In his early years he was a painter, but about the year 1773 he began trade in a building which stood near the present store of Jonathan Hildreth. About 1780 he bought what had been used as a government store, fronting the square, which was forty feet long, twenty-four wide, and one story high, and heavily tim- bered, to which he added a second story, and fitted it for a store; he soon afterwards erected another westerly of this, of the same length and height, making one building eighty 144 MEMOIR. feet in length. The new part was finished as a dwelling- house, and was occupied by him until his death. He was a man of peace; he believed wars to be a great calamity, and that they were never justified but by extreme necessity, which, it seemed to him, had come to pass in the war of the Revolution. In this war he took a part, was at Concord fight, and an officer at the taking of Burgoyne, 1777. Soon after this he left the army. The life of a soldier was not congenial with his disposition nor agreeable to his taste. In speaking of the incidents of war, he said, though he dis- charged his musket many times at the Concord fight, and at the capture of Burgoyne, he hoped he had killed none of the enemy. From 1780 to 1790 trade was uncertain and often unprofit- able. Those of the present day can hardly realize the diffi- culties of business of all kinds during this period. After the colonies had achieved their independence, there was scarcely anything that could be used as a currency. Silver and gold were seen only to be hoarded away; to be kept, not to be used. Business must be done, if done at all, by bartering one article for another. ‘There were thirteen distinct independent sovereignties, each one making laws for itself, with little re- gard for the interest of other states, often manifesting jeal- ousy rather than kind feelings ; each state levied duties on foreign imports for itself. Massachusetts had poured out her blood and her wealth like water in that severe contest, and came forth at its close exhausted. She was compelled to levy high duties on foreign’ imports. Rhode Island lev- ied scarcely any duties. She did not want them to pay her debts, and so she went for free trade, —the consequence was, that Newport became the chief mart of foreign com- merce. In 1787 large warehouses might there be seen filled with goods from London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, and the West Indies. Traders from all parts of the country went there to make their purchases. Deacon White made journeys there for that purpose, — a journey then deemed as ¥OHN WHITE, 145 great as it is at this day to visit Chicago. The writer of this memoir has often heard himi describe those perilous adven- tures. But in 1790 a happy change appeared. The Constitution had been adopted, — duties were uniform in all the States, — enterprise started into new life, and with it credit and confi- dence: Washington was President. Fron that day the aspi- rations of John Adams were realized, — we had a country, and that a free country / Soon after this the French Revolu- tion broke forth, which soon involved all Europe and threat- ened the United States also ; but by the wise and far-seeing policy of Washington, who declared the neutrality of this country in European wars, we became the carriers of the commerce of the world. Our products were in great demand, all branches of business were prosperous,-and America grew rich, whilst Europe was devastated by war. There has been, perhaps, no period since the nation existed, considering its population, when so much wealth was accumulated as during the twenty years beginning 1790. It was during this period that Deacon White made business profitable. He had an extensive trade from towns in New Hampshire and Vermont. His store was widely known, and all who came to trade with him felt great confidence in his integrity and fair dealing, and thus his business was extended. But even he did not escape the slang of the envious. He was charged with selling spirit so weak that it would not run down hill; but being a temper- ate man, he did not taste of those articles often enough to be able to discern their true qualities. Again, he was charged with selling poor gunpowder. As an instance of this, they asserted that when John Thoreau was his clerk, he accident- ally set a cask of gunpowder on fire, and though immediate and active means were used to extinguish it, more than half of it was burned before the fire was put out. Deacon White was not a well-educated merchant, nor did he possess the skill which would insure success among strong competition ; but in those times he need only purchase his 10 146 MEMOIR. goods with ordinary care, mark them at the desired profits, and the sales would assuredly be made. After the year 1803, his business fell off to some extent. He had strong compet- itors, such as Charles Hammond, Richardson & Wheeler, and afterwards J. & J. H. Davis, and others, whose activity, skill, and vigor were more than a match for his steady habits. Business continued rather unprofitable for some years, during the non-intercourse and embargo, until 1812, when he ad- vertised his stock for sale, and the store to let. In Novem- ber of that year he sold out all his goods to two young men, for so many thousand dollars, without even taking an inven- tory of them. If peace had soon followed, it would have been a bad bargain; but as war was soon after declared, it proved to be a profitable purchase for the young men. The senior partner of Hemmenway & Shattuck died in 1816, and in 1817 Deacon White became concerned in business with the junior partner of the late firm. This continued till 1821, when he sold his interest to his partner, and retired ever after from active life. Deacon White, in his political opinions, was a Federalist. He took the ‘ Columbian Centinel.” He was not an office- seeker ; he felt an interest in political matters rather for the purpose of promoting the election of good men than for any selfish purpose. In 1812 the Federalists and Republicans were so nearly balanced that Deacon White and Benjamin Prescott were elected representatives to the General Court by one vote each. This was deemed very democratic, as each party was thus fairly represented according to numbers. His religious opinions inclined to the Calvinistic faith rather than the Unitarian, the faith of Rev. Dr. Ripley; yet no alienation existed between them until about the year 1826. It had been the policy of the Orthodox sect, for a few years previous to this period, to take possession of the old churches, if possible ; if not, to divide and form new societies, and to sever all connection with Christians professing the faith of Channing, Worcester, and Ware. For many years New Eng- JOHN WHITE. 147 land was rent asunder, and weak societies sprang up all over the country from this cause. It was hoped that Con- cord might be exempt from this contagion, because from the days of Bulkley (save for a short time) we had lived in har- mony, all attending the same church, and all contented with one society and one ministry. But we were not exempt. In 1826 John Vose, with about twenty others, seceded and formed a new church. The ties of affection and friendship between himself and Dr. Ripley and others were too strong to be easily severed. Deacon White was not willing then to join the seceders, but no efforts were wanting to induce him to do so, and the object was effected in 1827, when he re- signed the office of deacon, to which he was chosen in 1784, and which he had filled with so much propriety for over forty years ; he was dismissed from the church at his own request. Having paid over to his successor the church fund, of which he had been trustee, the church, on the 5th March, 1827, passed a unanimous vote of thanks for his long and faithful services as deacon and trustee. He was a strict observer, of the Sabbath. About the year 1826, the clergy, and many of the laity believed that the Sabbath was not observed as it ought to be. After consul- tation, it was agreed that measures should be used to pre- vent traveling on that day, except in cases of necessity. It was further provided that persons should be stationed on the different roads to prevent unnecessary traveling. It became Deacon White’s duty to guard the road leading over the causeway. On a bright May morning, as the last bell was ringing, he saw, opposite the Masonic Hall, a man dressed - in a clean white frock, driving a team of four horses, with a heavy laden wagon. He went directly towards him and said, “My friend, you are transgressing ; you profane the Sabbath by thus driving your team: you must stop.” ‘ Why, sir,” said the man, “I have now been absent from my house in Vermont many days. I started yesterday morning on my re- turn, and I cannot well afford to stay idle at a public house on 148 MEMOIR. such a fine day as this; and, besides, I intend to pass on peaceably, and do nothing to disturb others, and I hope you will permit me to pursue my journey.” ‘No,’ said the dea- con, “you.must not proceed!” The teamster then made fast his horses to the post near where they stood. Whilst he was doing this, Deacon White and wife had left their house for the church ; both dressed well. He always regarded neat- ness in dress as a duty. The teamster hastened his walk and overtook them at the town pump, and said he would take a seat with them in their pew. How well this was relished by Deacon W. no one knew, but in he went and sat down,— white frock with the finest cloth and the best Florence silk. After the forenoon service, he accompanied them quite home, and said he thought he would dine with them. Deacon White always had a good dinner on Sunday. After dinner the afternoon service was attended like the forenoon. The teamster invited himself to tea, the poor horses during this time busily kicking at flies. It was asserted that the deacon watched the declining sun with some impatience, and when it was hid just behind Lee’s Hill, he pulled up his dickey, as was his custom on important occasions, and said, ‘“ Mr. What ’s natne, you may go now, sir,” and Mr. What’s name departed, thinking that after all the deacon had the worst of it. The horses might have been of a different opinion. After Deacon White’s marriage to his second wife, Mrs. Hayward, of Braintree, her two sons, Caleb and Ebenezer, passed much time with their mother in Concord. They were at that time aged fourteen and eighteen years, and were in the main very clever young men, but full of all manner of roguery. It so happened that the Deacon and Mrs. White left home for a visit of several days, leaving the two young men to amuse themselves as they might. Among other means of diversion they had much to say to Poll parrot. This was a singular bird. She had a wonderful power of imitating sounds: she would imitate the teamster with his oxen, the milkman’s whistle, and the fishman’s horn; the sick man’s FYOHN WHITE. 149 cough and the school-boy’s laugh ; the birds on the trees and the poultry in the yard ; she would crow with any cock, and cluck with any hen; all considerate bipeds of this class would give it up in despair after the first trial The young men taught Poll certain parts of speech she had not yet learned, such as some new modes of address, and certain forms of sal- utation, which, though they might be tolerable English, were not fit to be uttered before ears refined. When at length the deacon and his lady returned, they were received by all the family most affectionately. Congratulations and kisses were abundant, after which inquiries were made for Poll. Where is Poll? She hung in the lilac in the front yard. Out the deacon goes and says, “Pretty Poll, how do you do?” “ Hallo, damme, old fellow, how do you do? ha, ha!” says Poll. “Tut, tut,” says Deacon White. “Tut, tut, too, damme, old fellow! ha, ha!” says Poll. The deacon, find- ing Poll a hard case, left her, to seek after the culprits, and he knew where to look for them. He called up the two young men, and charged them with having tampered with Poll’s moral character. They did not wholly deny the charge, but said, by way of extenuation, that they had only been teaching Poll how to articulate. ‘‘ Young gentlemen,” said the deacon, with a half-suppressed smile, “I will dispense with all your teachings in future on articulation, and hope I shall hear no more of it.” One other instance of Poll’s power of imitation may be related. On a fair June morning when Poll hung in the lilac bush, and was unusually cheerful, Cap- tain Charles Miles, who supplied the village with meat, drove up his cart in front of the store, leaving his horse loose, as was his custom, and went into the house to inquire if they wanted anything that day. Whether he stopped to chat with the deacon, the housemaid, or some other person, is unknown, but he stayed longer than usual; at any rate Poll thought he was gone quite long enough, so she gave his word and his whistle exactly ; the horse started and made directly for the tavern, which was then the centre of gravity, as it has 150 MEMOIR. often been since. As Poll urged him on with loud shouts, when he reached the tavern he had acquired great speed, and, as he turned the corner, the axle of the cart came in contact with the stone post, and the whole was instantly upset, and the meat scattered; at that very moment Poll, in the most unfeeling manner, set up a boisterous laugh. Tom Heald declared that there had not been such a fall in mutton and tripe in the memory of the oldest inhabitant. It would have been ruinous to Captain Miles, but that on the follow- ing morning prices quietly resumed their old standard, only that purchasers demanded a small allowance for mud and dirt, which was readily granted. Deacon White was fond of children— would inquire the names of those he did not remember, and say, Be good boys, go to school, and mind your mother, and, as they went away, give them little books, of which he always kept a supply. Children would not let New Year’s Day pass without going to see Deacon White. Through the entire day might be heard, “ Deacon, I wish you a happy New Year,” and they all had something for their kind wishes. Sometimes the wish might not have been entirely disinterested, — the mother might have given the lesson, as thus, “ Deacon, I wish you a happy New Year, and mother says I may take a primer, and the rest in sugar,” and the little urchin had both. He was kind, charitable, and benevolent, —the poor and destitute never applied in vain. He had kind words for the afflicted, and those kind words were remembered long after mere acts of charity were forgotten. His deeds of charity were not like the broad river, to be seen by all who passed by, but more like the meadow brook, flowing, still constant, clear, and almost unseen, but, as it ripples, sparkling over the pebbles below. He was active in promoting the welfare of the church, the religious society, and the moral and civil improvement of the community. He was a willing contributor to the missionary, Bible, ' FOHN WHITE. I51 peace, education, and other societies ; was a cordial friend to the clergy ; to his house they were always welcome. Be- tween himself and the lamented Dr. Ripley there had always existed the most intimate and friendly relations, until the formation of the Second Religious Society, which has been before alluded to; and when it was known to the doctor that Deacon White had nearly made up his mind to join it, he was grieved, but still hoped by argument and expostulation to prevent it. But it was too late! The influences brought to bear upon him were not to be overcome. The loss of such aman to Dr. Ripley and the church was severely felt ; but to the new society he was a great acquisition, to which, dur- ing the few years he lived after he joined it, he was a liberal contributor, and at his death he left a legacy for its support. His conversation and manners were, though more serious than cheerful, always courteous and instructive. No one could become acquainted with him and listen to his conver- sation without feeling towards him great respect. He seemed to be imbued with principles, the power of which, though uttered more than eighteen hundred years ago, is not even now fully known or appreciated, to wit, kindness, sympathy, love. In these he believed and trusted. They were with him in his daily walks, like good angels, guiding his steps along the pathway of life. When reviled, he re- viled not again ; and when assaulted by evil on one cheek, he overcame that evil by offering the other cheek. It would be difficult to find a man who had lived so long in whom there was so little to reprove; and as difficult to find one in whose life and character there was so much to love and imitate. He died January 9, 1830, aged eighty years and three months, and was entombed in the Old Burying Ground. December, 1854. 152 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF EPHRAIM WOOD. BY ELIJAH WOOD, JR. Ephraim Wood was one of the first members of the club. He was born August 1, 1733, and William, his ancestor, was the father of a large family of that name. William had two children, Michael and Ruth. Michael lived on the farm now owned by Samuel Dennis. He had six children, Jacob, Abraham, Isaac, Thompson, John, and Abigail. Jacob had six children, Jacob, Mary, Ephraim, Dorcas, Hannah, Milli- cent. Of Ephraim there is no record, except that he mar- ried Mary Bass, and died March 20, 1789, aged eighty-eight years. He was father to Ephraim, the subject of this me- moir, and lived on the farm of his father and grandfather. Ephraim, Jr., was married to Mary Heald (the daughter of Amos Heald, who lived on the Hayden farm in Lincoln), October 24, 1758, by the Rev. Daniel Bliss. She died July 13, 1807, leaving ten children, Danie], Perces, Stephen, Na- than, Hannah, who died young, Hannah, 2d, Ephraim, Will- iam, Elijah, John. John is the only one living. Ephraim married for his second wife Millicent Barrett, widow of James Barrett, Esq., January 28, 1808. She survived him, and died June 1, 1821. His mother was a very resolute woman, and scolded the British for coming here to oppress the people, which called forth the remark from one, ‘ Old woman, we _ will not hurt you ; you will die yourself before long.” He inherited the farm (now owned and occupied by Elijah Wood, Jr.) from his mother, where he lived from his marriage to his death. He gave one half of the farm to his son Nathan, when he became of age. Nathan died young, and it was given to Nathan, 2d, who afterwards sold to Elijah Wood. EPHRAIM WOOD. 153 The house on the premises and the one on the farm, now oc- cupied by Mr. Dennis, were both raised in one day in the fall of 1763, being built by two brothers, Ephraim and Amos. He was anxious to have the farm kept in the name and not divided, and said he did not wish to have his farm cut into shoe-strings after he was gone. He was remarkably straight, and very large in stature, weighing two hundred and fifty pounds. It is said the calf of his leg measured twenty-four inches in circumference. He was bred a shoemaker, and learned the trade in times of “‘ whipping the cat,” which was to go from house to house making and mending shoes, and worked in a half under-ground shop, which stood between the house and barn now on the premises, under an old balm- in-Gilead tree, the trunk of which is now standing. He was very successful in business, and added considerable to his property. It is said that one of his neighbors of the craft was one day complaining of his ill luck, and of having a poor trade, to a Scotchman. “Oh,” says the Scotchman, “you have a very poor trade, but Ephraim Wood have a very good trade.” He had no other advantages of education than what were afforded by the very imperfect common schools of that day. He had a calm, considerate mind and sound judgment, which peculiarly fitted him to act an important part in the times in which it was his lot to live. He held many of- fices of trust in the town. He was chosen first selectman, town clerk, assessor, and overseer of the poor in 1771, and reélected twenty-seven years ; and for much of the spirit of those times, which have come down to us as a matter of rec- ord, we are indebted to him, as Shattuck’s “ History ” fully shows. He was one of the first justices appointed by the council after the secession from British authority, and held the office during the remainder of his life. He was ap- pointed special judge of the Court of Common Pleas, March 12, 1785, and judge of the same court 1797, and held the office till the new organization of the court in 1811. In hin, says a notice published soon after his death, were united 154 MEMOIR. those qualities and virtues which formed a character at once amiable, useful, respectable, and religious. Early in life, he engaged in civil and public business, and, by a judicious ahd faithful discharge of duty, acquired confidence and a reputa- tion with his fellow-citizens and the public. The American Revolution called into exercise his active and vigorous pow- ers ; and as a magistrate and in various departments he ren- dered important services to the community. He used his influence in kindling the spirit of liberty in the colonies. He was on a committee, chosen in 1773, to prepare an answer and instructions to the representative of the town, denying the power of parliament to tax them without their consent, and expressed their firm determination never to submit to any infringement of their liberty. He was chairman of the committee resolving not to duy, se//, or use any tea or any article on which there was a duty for raising a revenue. He was one of the delegates to the convention at Concord, Au- gust 30th and 31st, to consult on the proper measures to be taken when the act was passed for the better regulation of the government of Massachusetts Bay, and was one of the committee chosen to wait on several individuals who had taken part on the side of government, and compel them to recant and forswear all concern in any offices under the law for altering the charter. He went to his neighbor, Dr. Lee (supposing him to be a whig), and asked him to go to Cam- bridge and see the men who had accepted offices under gov- ernment. His answer was, “Myheart is with you, but [ cannot go ;” but, immediately on his family retiring to bed, he started to inform the officers, and was seen in the morn- ing fording the river above the South Bridge in great haste, with his long stockings down to his heels. Afterwards, the Committee of Correspondence, of which Mr. Wood was one, were of the opinion that Lee be confined to his farm, and the people supported them in their decision. He was one of the committee appointed to present a copy of the Continental Congress Association to every individual in town for their EPHRAIM WOOD ols signature, and likewise one to see that the articles of associa- tion were observed in the minute companies. Stores were deposited in his possession, namely, six barrels of powder and a quantity of bullets. When the alarm was given that the British were coming to town, and orders for the removal of the stores, he started for home with a keg of powder on his back, and, when he came in sight of the South Bridge, it was guarded by regulars. He immediately started down the river, knowing where there was a boat, and just crossed as they came up on the other side. Previous to this, they had entered his house for the purpose of taking him prisoner, but being actively engaged in directing the important events of the day, and in removing the stores, he escaped detection. He followed the British on their retreat to Charlestown with his gun in his hands. Dr. Lee often told him, after the war, that his house would have been burned if he had not in- terfered for him. He was one of the delegates to the State Convention, July 14, 1779, to establish a state price current, and to adopt other means ‘to prevent monopoly and unfair dealing. On the 1st of October, 1776, this town was called upon to act on the question whether it would give its consent that the House of Representatives, with the Council, should enact a Constitution or form of government for this-state. The subject was referred to a committee, of which he was chairman. They reported against it; but in the fall of 1779 he was delegate to a convention in Cambridge, and a Constitution was formed. He obtained the pardon of Job Shattuck, one of the leading insurgents in Middlesex County, in 1787, thereby showing his sympathy for those who unfor- tunately acted from mistaken views. The rights and liber- ties of his country were near his heart, and he was a warm and zealous defender of them against all encroachments. He was a true disciple of the great Washington, a friend to “liberty with order,” and firmly attached to “the union of the States and the constitutional independence of the indi- vidual States.” 156 MEMOIR. In domestic life his disposition and example were highly amiable and worthy. As a Christian, he was ardent and sincere. Having lived the life he died the “death of the righteous.” He, and his wife Mary joined the church Jan- uary 3,1796. His last sickness was caused by his being knocked down by a cow, and terminated in the palsy in his throat, and, as it was impossible to take nourishment, he died of starvation, April 8, 1814, aged eighty years and eight months. February, 1854. FOHN VOSE. 157 MEMOIR OF JOHN VOSE. ; BY CYRUS WARREN. John Vose, the subject of this memoir, was born in Milton, Mass., in 1761. ‘It is thought by some of his associates that he was here at the time of the Revolution, but I can find no record of his having lived in Concord until the year 1783, which was the first year of his paying taxes in this place. He married Mercy Foster, of Charlestown. He was a tan- ner by trade, and began the business in this village about the year 1783, and carried it on about forty years. Tan- ning business was carried on very differently in those days from what it is now. He retailed all the leather which he tanned. He had customers in all the neighboring towns, who used to come and buy in small quantities. He had one peculiarity in trading: he would take out a few sides of sole leather at a time, and mark the finest sides for particular customers, to prevent their being selected, and when a cus- tomer called who was about to leave because he could not find anything to suit him, rather than not trade, the deacon would tell him that customer had not called, and he had some more drying, and he would mark another side for him. He had a very gentle way of dunning. Sometimes, when he met one who owed him, he would tell him he had not charged the last side which he bought ; he had only put it down on the slate. He was an honest, upright man; punctual in ful- filling his promises; as his neighbor, the late Dr. Heywood, said, he was always willing to lend him money, for if he did not pay it soon, he would be sure to call and see if he wanted it. Deacon Vose was one of the original members of this Circle, and for several years they met at his house, once a 158 MEMOIR. week, during the season for holding their meetings ; he fur- nished the refreshments, and they paid him. He continued a member until 1832, when he resigned. In 1819 he built a good barn, and about that time closed up his tanning busi- ness, and turned his attention to agriculture. He was a very good farmer, and it was said of him that he raised the most English hay of any man in town, according to the number of acres he cultivated. He was a member of Dr. Ripley’s society and church from early life until the year 1826, when he left, and became one of the first in assisting to build up a Trinitarian society, where he was chosen one of the first deacons of the church, and remained a respected and beloved member during his life. He was a public-spirited, patriotic citizen, and always willing to bear his part of the burdens of society. He had no children, but he adopted a niece of his own and one of his wife’s. They educated and brought them up as their own. Near the close of his life he made his will, appointed Hon. Nathan Brooks his executor, and put the care of his widow and property into his hands. ; He died in April, 1833, aged seventy-two. January, 1856. JOHN RICHARDSON. 159 MEMOIR OF JOHN RICHARDSON. BY GEORGE KEYES. John Richardson was born in the town of Watertown, of © poor but honest parents, on the 16th day of July, 1758. I do not find, upon careful examination of the history of the Corinthian Lodge, by L. A. Surette,’ or any other reliable authority, that the year of his birth was marked by any great disturbance of the heavenly bodies, or that anything very, extraordinary occurred in the world during that summer. Although in after life the proprietor of a line of stables from Boston to Keene, I cannot find that he was laid in a manger, or waited upon by any deputation of wise men at this early period of his existence, other than those who are usual on such occasions. ‘The assertion that Tennyson, the poet-lau- reate, should have derived one of the ideas so beautifully expressed by him in the poem of the “ Grandmother” from any of the surroundings of young John, I think open to grave doubt, as I have not been able to obtain any authentic information that the poet ever heard of his birth. Ido not find, from good authority, that John in his youth did any remarkable thing. I am afraid that he never cut down a valuable tree of his father’s, and then waited upon him with tears in his eyes and the assurance that he could not tell a lie, and so escaped the merited thrashing ; but I do think it highly probable that he may have ridden some valuable colt to death, and told many lies, and received as many thrash- ings as usually fell to the lot of the enterprising youth of his day. History is silent as to whether he was ever caught in the act of flying his kite on Sunday; but if he was, I have no doubt he was as ready with the excuse that he was en- SS 160 MEMOIR. deavoring to draw the lightning from the clouds as an- other distinguished American was on a similar occasion. History is also silent as to the reason of his receiving the name of John. I can only account for it on the supposition that his parents must have had a foreboding of his busy, trading life, and selected it from the Scripture, from its con- nection with a charger as appropriate to him when making his various trades. He was apprenticed early in life to Deacon Townsend, a baker in Waltham, and I find him showing signs of his fut- ure shrewdness on the rgth of April, 1775 (the day when the slight unpleasantness between the colonies and the mother country began), by trading off a load of bread belonging to his master for a load of powder, which he carried to Lexing- ton and disposed of, returning to his master with the story that he had been ordered to do so by the selectmen and brother deacons. Whether actuated by a spirit of patriotism, or on account of this transaction, he soon after, at the age of seventeen, enlisted, and served for a short time in the militia, a grateful country giving him a pension for the rest of his life in return for his valuable aid in its time of need. He came to Concord in 1778, and, having been bred to the business, opened the bakeshop in the building now owned by Mr. Daniel Wood, nearly opposite the hotel. He built the house known as the county house, now owned by the Catholics; but in 1789, seeing a chance for a good trade, swapped it with the county for the hotel which stood upon the spot now occupied by the Middlesex House. He gave the county the land upon which to build the jail now stand- ing, and in return was appointed the first jailer when it was finished. He had an interest in the tannery which was established on what is now the Mill-dam, and constantly in- creased his means by his various trades until 1802, when he formed a business partnership with Jonathan Wheeler, under the style of Richardson & Wheeler, and carried on an ex- tensive business in the building opposite the Unitarian church, next to the house of Cyrus Pierce, FOHN RICHARDSON. IOI But the small town soon proved too contracted a field for the operation of his active mind, and in 1805 he sold out to J. & J. H. Davis, and removed to Boston, where he en- tered largely into the importing business, having branch es- tablishments in New York and Baltimore, until the death of his partner in 18rz, when he retired, and turning his atten- tion to investing his money in real estate, settled in Newton, in which town he lived until his death in 1837, at the age of seventy-nine. He was largely interested in hotels, owning at one time as many as twenty, and having it said of him that he could ride from Boston to Keene, N. H., and take all his meals and sleep in his own houses. He was a man of great en- ergy and industry, always taking the lead of any man that he employed, in all kinds of work, rising very early, and oblig- ing his family to do the same at all seasons of the year. Upon one occasion, when leaving the hotel in this town, he fell, as he was getting into his sleigh, and dislocated his shoulder. His friend begged him to remain, but he said he had some business that must be attended to, and drove to his house in Newton with his shoulder out of joint, and it is said that it required the aid of several strong men to pull it into place again. He was always proud of his activity, and in a talk with a gentleman of rather sedentary habits, the conversation. turned upon how much quicker some men wore out their boots than others, and his friend was inclined to blame him for not wearing his longer. He at length became a little vexed, and said: ‘Look here, Squire; you just put your boots into the seat of your breeches, and you will find you will wear them out a great deal quicker than you do now.” He was always a great driver in any work that he had under way. At one time when called upon by some friends at his home in Newton, while talking with them in his par- lor, he asked them to excuse him for a short time, as’ he had some business to attend to. After they had left, one 11 162 MEMOIR. had the curiosity to ask the other “ what business had called him away so suddenly ;” when it was found that his quick eye had seen a party of his men, who were shoveling manure at his barn, working, as he thought, too slowly. He had gone from the parlor to the place where they were at work, and loaded up one or two carts, to show them how it should be done, and then back to his company, stopping to change some of his clothes and his boots on the way. He was a large, strongly built man, and must have weighed over two hundred pounds; of a cheerful temperament, and, according to the ideas of his time, not very religious. The only record I can find of his religious views was his speech when he had two men disputing upon religion, who deferred to him. He is reported to have said, ‘“‘ What’s the use of talking. See here, when God pronounced the curse upon Adam, he said his body should return to the dust, and his spirit to God who gave it. Now, you may put in just as much filling as you please, you can’t alter the web.” Whether he had any vague notions of temperance, in the modern acceptance of the term, I know not; but I feel very positive that he never belonged to any lodge of Good Tem- plars, and that his various hotels were never interfered with by any state constables. He was liberal in his way, and I have no doubt charitable. He made many enemies in his numerous trading operations, and they hated him intensely. One of them said on one occasion, in regard to his charities, that he exceeded the Scripture injunction in regard to it; for he not only did not Jet his right hand know what his left hand did, but he never did anything with his right hand for fear his left would find it out. But he certainly was very kind to all his relatives, often assisting them, and at one time he supported and edu- cated in his own family four children of Mr. Wood, after their father’s death. In one respect he was surpassed by most of the members of the club of his day, and that was in the number of his FOHN RICHARDSON. 163 wives and children, He never had but two wives and only five children; while I think the usual allowance to mem- bers of his time was three wives and fifteen to eighteen children. : By his first wife he had one daughter, and by his second two daughters and two sons. One of his sons is still living in Worcester. The sons both received a liberal education, and graduated from Harvard College. The story is told, as an illustration of his habits of life, that upon one occa- sion when his son was furnishing his room at college he requested his father to allow him to purchase a carpet. “No,” said John; “I have no objections to the carpet, but if I pay for that, I won’t pay for shoes, for you have no business to have both at one time.” For his time, and in his way, he was a power in the land. For our time he would probably have been a great railroad manager, and made his mark broad and deep, not only over the land, but into the pockets of the stockholders. He would have been great at log-rolling in committee rooms, watering stock in directors’ parlors, or getting up great speculations in oil wells, silver mines, or telegraphs. But in his time there was no such field for his enterprise. His only idea of “ log-roll- ing” was a hard task with men and oxen in the woods and swamps. “ Watering stock ” with him meant driving his cat- tle to the nearest brook or pond; and instead of housing “bulls and bears” in comfortable offices in our principal cities, the one was only tolerated as a necessary evil with his herds of cows, while the other was hunted as a “ var- mint” which every one thought it right to destroy. To sum up his qualities in a few words, ‘‘I think he was a man who could keep a hotel.” February 21, 1871. 164 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF ISAAC HURD, M. D. BY E. R. HOAR, Dr. Isaac Hurd was the son of Benjamin Hurd, and was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, July 27, 1756. He en- tered Harvard College in 1772, and graduated in 1776, in the same class with Christopher Gore, Chief Justice Sewall, Judge Thacher, Chief Justice Tyler, of Vermont, Dr. Aaron Dexter, the first professor of chemistry and materia medica at Cambridge, and his own subsequent pastor and life-long friend, Dr. Ripley, of Concord. On leaving college, he im- mediately entered upon the study of medicine with Dr. Prescott, of Groton, and in 1778 settled in Billerica as a practicing physician. In the mean time he was for four months a surgeon in the Army of the Revolution. On the 13th of September, 1778, he married Miss Sally Tompson, the daughter of William and Sarah Tompson. She was born January 12, 1758, and died June 1, 1789. They had five children: William Tompson, Sally, Isaac, Jr., Betsey, and Benjamin. Isaac, Jr., was the only one of these who was married, and he had a large family of children, and be- came a well-known citizen of Concord, and a member of the Social Circle. On the death of his wife, Dr. Hurd removed to Concord, where he became at once a leading and influential citizen, and continued in the practice of his profession until his death. In December, 1790, he married Mrs. Polly Wilder, the widow of Josiah Wilder, M. D., of Lancaster. She was the daughter of Gershom and Mary Flagg, of Boston ; was born October 25, 1750, and died November 26, 1821, and had ISAAC HURD, M. D. 165. two children by her first husband, Henry and Mary Wilder. Her daughter Mary married a West Indian, whose name was Scalckwick, who left her early a widow, and afterward married the Honorable Daniel Appleton White, of Salem, judge of probate for the county of Essex. Before her first marriage, and during her widowhood, Mrs. Scalckwick was the most distinguished of all the young ladies of Concord for beauty, grace, and sprightliness. She was the belle of the village, and the fascination of her manners and conver- sation made the hospitable mansion of Dr. Hurd a most attractive place to the young men of that day, and has come down as a beautiful tradition to later times. February 3, 1825, Dr. Hurd married as his third wife Mrs. Mary Bates, the widow of Captain Caleb Bates, of Concord. Her maiden name was Polly Douglass, of Scituate. She was born September 30, 1775, and died February 22, 1854. Dr. Hurd died November 19, 1844, at the age of eighty- eight, having continued to practice his profession to the very close of his life. His early medical education must have been very imperfect ; and the means of obtaining a thorough one were extremely limited at that period. There was no medical school connected with the university then, and the opportunities for instruction within reach of the or- dinary country practitioners were far behind the standard established by modern science. He did not receive the degree of doctor of medicine until the year 1819 ; but he had a large practice, and his great experience gave him a professional position and a reputation for skill which it might have been difficult to trace to any other source. I speak with diffidence upon such a subject ; but it has seemed to me that those old doctors, perhaps from very humble be- ginnings, accompanied by many failures and mistakes, and with a good deal of pretension not agreeable to modern taste, attained at last to a’ practical sagacity that almost equalled, if it did not in some respects surpass, the results of scientific culture. They had an acquaintance with the 166 MEMOIR. common diseases like that which the botanist has with plants, —recognizing their type and generic character at a ‘glance, under any diversity of form; and in the treatment of them finding their way with the steady confidence of an Indian in a wood. I have not understood that Dr. Hurd’s professional brethren thought very highly of him, and he had a pompous way of speaking, and showed a disposition to magnify his own achievements, for which cultivated men are apt to feel contempt; but that he had some substantial merits was proved by his retaining the confidence and re- spect of many of our best people, who continued to employ him even in the extreme decline of his powers; and with all his faults and imperfections, he had a certain instinctive sa- gacity which made him trusted as a physician, while his kindness and fidelity to his patients were such as to show that he had the feelings of a gentleman. Dr. Johnson’s famous lines may be well applied to him: — “ Yet still he fills affection’s eye, Obscurely wise and coarsely kind ; Nor lettered arrogance deny The praise to merit unrefined. “When fainting nature called for aid, And hovering death prepared the blow, His vigorous remedy displayed The power of art without the show.” Dr. Hurd was a man of very strong physical constitution, rather below the middle height, thick-set, fleshy ; his hair strong, abundant, but little tinged with gray, until quite ad- vanced in age, and toward the close of his life of a silver whiteness. His features were large, his voice was rather gruff in tone, his utterance rapid, and in the latter part of his life a little indistinct from loss of teeth. He was a large owner of real estate, and, when I first knew him, was reputed to be the wealthiest man in the town. He owned a place in Billerica, one on the borders of Car- ISAAC HURD, M. D. 167 lisle, various wood lots, lands, and houses in the east part of the village in Concord, and all the land on the north side of the Main Street, from the mill brook to the house of Samuel Hoar, including two taverns. But, in part from his son’s misfortunes in business, and in part from holding a great deal of unproductive real estate which he had not paid for, he lost his property, and for the last twelve years of his life was very poor. He was assisted by a wealthy brother, and applied for and obtained a small pension for his services in the Revolutionary War; but his old age was tried by that saddest of human experiences to a proud nature, fond of power, and even inclined to be imperious, the change from affluence and domestic comfort and a sense of social impor- tance to poverty and solitude in his declining years. He had a strong will, and was long used to being looked up to in his family, and treated with consideration and deference by ‘his neighbors ; and it is no wonder that he felt the change in his circumstances keenly, and that it made him querulous. But his relations with some of his patients and friends were unchanged, and it was touching to see how deeply the old man felt every token of respect and kindness. He delivered an address before the Humane Society in 1799, which was published. He was one of the founders of the society of Freemasons in the village ; and of his emi- nent services in that department of usefulness, the work which he did therein, the honors which he won and wore, and “the antique and beautiful master’s jewel”? which he gave to the brethren, are they not all duly and fully recorded in the book of the chronicles of the Corinthian Lodge, to be known and read of all men? Dr. Hurd was one of the original members of the Social Circle at its second reorganization in 1794, and continued a member till 1831, when he resigned, and was succeeded by Captain Nathan Barrett. He was a frequent attendant at its meetings, and the records show that he was often chosen to preside. March 21, 1865. 168 MEMOIR. MEMOIR OF REV. EZRA RIPLEY, D. D. BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON. Ezra Ripley was born May 1, 1751 (O. 5.), at Woodstock, Connecticut. He was the fifth of the nineteen children of Noah and Lydia (Kent) Ripley. Seventeen of these nine- teen children married, and it is stated that the mother died, leaving nineteen children, one hundred and two grandchil- dren, and ninety-six great-grandchildren. The father was born at Hingham, on the farm purchased by his ancestor, William Ripley, of England, at the first settlement of the “town, which farm has been occupied by seven.or eight gen- erations. Ezra Ripley followed the business of farming till sixteen years of age, when his father wished him to be quali- fied to teach a grammar school, not thinking himself able to send one son to college without injury to his other children. With this view, the father agreed with the late Rev. Dr. Forbes, of Gloucester, then minister of North Brookfield, to fit Ezra for college by the time he should be twenty-one years of age, and to have him labor during the time suffi- ciently to pay for his instruction, clothing, and books. But, when fitted for college, the son could not be con- tented with teaching, which he had tried the preceding win- ter. He had early manifested a desire for learning, and could not be satisfied without a public education. Always inclined to notice ministers, and frequently attempting, when only five or six years old, to imitate them by preaching, now that he had become a professor of religion he had an ardent desire to be a preacher of the gospel. He had to encounter great difficulties, but, through a kind Providence and the patronage of Dr. Forbes, he entered Harvard Uni- t EZRA RIPLEY, D. D. 169 versity, July, 1772. The commencement of the Revolution- ary War greatly interrupted his education at college. In 1775, in his senior year, the college was removed from Cam- bridge to this town. The studies were much broken up. Many of the students entered the army, and the class never returned to Cambridge. There were an unusually large num- ber of distinguished men in this class of 1776: Christopher Gore, Governor of Massachusetts and Senator in Congress ; Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice of Massachusetts ; George Thacher, Judge of the Supreme Court; Royal Tyler, Chief Justice of Vermont ; and the late learned Dr. Prince, of Sa- lem. Mr. Ripley was ordained minister of Concord No- vember 7, 1778. He married, November 16, 1780, Mrs. Phebe (Bliss) Emerson, then a widow of thirty-nine, with five children. They had three children: Samuel, born May 11, 1783; Daniel Bliss, born August 1, 1784; Sarah, born April 8, 1789. He died September 21, 1841. To these facts, gathered chiefly from his own diary, and. stated nearly in his own words, I can only add a few traits from memory. He was identified with the ideas and forms of the New England church, which expired about the same time with him, so that he and his coevals seemed the rear guard of the great camp and army of the Puritans, which, however in its last days declining into formalism, in the heyday of its strength had planted and liberated America. It was a pity that his old meeting-house should have been modernized in his time. JI am sure all who remember both will associate his form with whatever was grave and droll in the old, cold,. unpainted, uncarpeted, square-pewed meeting-house, with its four iron-gray deacons in their little box under the pulpit, with Watts’s hymns, with long prayers, rich with the dic- tion of ages, and not less with the report like musketry from the movable seats. He and his contemporaries, the old New England clergy, were believers in what is called a particular Providence, — certainly, as they held it, a very particular 170 MEMOIR. Providence, — following the narrowness of King David and the Jews, who thought the universe existed only or mainly for their church and congregation. Perhaps I cannot better illustrate this tendency than by citing a record from the diary of the father of his predecessor, the minister of Mal- den, written in the blank leaves of the almanac for the year 1735. The minister writes against January 31st: ‘“‘ Bought a shay for £27 tos. The Lord grant it may be a comfort and blessing to my family.” In March following he notes: “Had a safe and comfortable journey to York.” But in April 24th, we find: “ Shay overturned, with my wife and I in it, yet neither of us much hurt. Blessed be our gracious Preserver. Part of the shay, as it lay upon one side, went over my wife, and yet she was scarcely anything hurt. How wonderful the preservation!” Then again, May 5th: ‘ Went to the beach with three of the children. The beast, being frightened when we were all out of the shay, overturned and broke it. I desire (I hope I desire it) that the Lord would teach me suitably to repent this Providence, to make suitable remarks on it, and to be suitably affected with it. Have I done well to get me a shay? Have I not been proud or too fond of this convenience? Do I exercise the faith in the Divine care and protection which I ought todo? Should I not be more in my study and less fond of diversion? Do I not withhold more than is meet from pious and charitable uses?” Well, on 15th May we have this: “ Shay brought home ; mending cost ‘thirty shillings. Favored in this re- spect beyond expectation.” 16th May: “My wife and I rode together to Rumney Marsh. The beast frighted sev- eral times.” And at last we have this record, June 4th: “Disposed of my shay to Rev. Mr. White.” The same faith made what was strong and what was weak in Dr. Ripley and his associates. He was a perfectly sin- cere man, punctual, severe, but just and charitable, and if he made his forms a strait-jacket to others, he wore the same himself all his years. Trained in this church, and very well EZRA RIPLEY, D. D. I7I qualified by his natural talent to work in it, it was never out of his mind. He looked at every person and thing from the parochial point of view. I remember, when a boy, driving about Concord with him, and in passing each house he told the story of the family that lived in it; and especially he gave me anecdotes of the nine church members who had made a division in the church in the time of his predecessor, and showed me how every one of the nine had come to bad fortune or to a bad end, His prayers for rain and against the lightning, “ that it may not lick up our spirits,” and for good weather, and against sickness and insanity, that we have not been tossed to and fro until the dawning of the day, that we have not been a terror to ourselves and others, are well remembered, and his own entire faith that these petitions were not to be overlooked, and were entitled to a favorable answer. Some of those around me will rémem- ber one occasion of severe drought in this vicinity, when the late Rev. Mr. Goodwin offered to relieve the doctor of the duty of leading in prayer ; but the doctor, suddenly remem- bering the season, rejected his offer with some humor, as with an air that said to all the congregation, “ This is no time for you young Cambridge men; the affair, sir, is get- ting serious. I will pray myself.” One August afternoon, when I was in his hayfield helping him with his man to rake up his hay, I well remember his pleading, almost reproach- ful, looks at the sky, when the thunder gust was coming up to spoil his hay. He raked very fast, then looked at the cloud, and said, “ We are in the Lord’s hand ; mind your rake, George! We are in the Lord’s hand ;”” and seemed to say, “ You know me ; this field is mine, — Dr. Ripley’s, — thine own servant!” He used to tell the story of one of his old friends, the minister of Sudbury, who, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergymen praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner, and said, “You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under 172 MEMOIR. your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Con- cord and Sudbury are under water.” I once rode with him to a house at Nine Acre Corner to attend the funeral of the father of a family. He mentioned to me on the way his fears that the oldest son, who was now to succeed to the farm, was becoming intemperate. We presently arrived, and the doctor addressed each of the mourners separately : “Sir, I condole with you.” “ Madam, I condole with you.” “ Sir, I knew your great-grandfather. When I came to this town, your great-grandfather was a substantial farmer in this very place, a member of the church, and an excellent citizen. Your grandfather followed him, and was a virtuous man. Now your father is to be carried to his grave, full of labors and virtues. There is none of that large family left but you, and it rests with you to bear up the good name and useful- ness of your ancestors. If you fail, Ichabod, the glory is departed. Let us pray.” Right manly he was, and the manly thing he could always say. JI remember a little speech he made to me, when the last tie of blood which held me and my brothers to his house was broken by the death of his daughter. He said, on parting, “1 wish you and your brothers to come to this house as you have always done. You will not like to be excluded; I shall not like to be neglected.” When “ Put Merriam,” after his release from the state prison, had the effrontery to call on the doctor as an old ac- quaintance, in the midst of general conversation Mr. Frost came in, and the doctor presently said, “ Mr. Merriam, my brother and colleague, Mr. Frost, has come to take tea with me. I regret very much the causes (which you know very well) which make it impossible for me to ask you to stay and break bread with us.” With the doctor’s views it was a matter of religion to say thus much. He had a reverence and love of society, and the patient, continuing courtesy, carrying out every respectful attention to the end, which marks what is called the manners of the old school. His EZRA RIPLEY, D. D. 173 hospitality obeyed Charles Lamb’s rule, and “ran fine to the last.” His partiality for ladies was always strong, and was by no means abated by time. He claimed privilege of years, was much addicted to kissing ; spared neither maid, wife, nor widow, and, as a lady thus favored re- marked to me, “seemed as if he was going to make a meal of you.” He was very credulous, and as he was no reader of books or journals he knew nothing beyond the columns of his weekly religious newspaper, the tracts of his sect, and, per- haps, the ‘‘ Middlesex Yeoman.” He was the easy dupe of any tonguey agent, whether colonizationist or anti-papist, or charlatan of iron combs, or tractors, or phrenology, or mag- netism, who went by. At the time when Jack Downing’s letters were in every paper, he repeated to me at table some of the particulars of that gentleman’s intimacy with General Jackson, in a man- ner that betrayed to me at once that he took the whole for fact. To undeceive him, I hastened to recall some particu- lars to show the absurdity of the thing, as the major and the President going out skating on the Potomac, etc. ‘ Why,” said the doctor with perfect faith, “it was a bright moon- light night ;’? and I am not sure that he did not die in the belief in the reality of Major Downing. Like other credu- lous men, he was opinionative, and, as I well remember, a great browbeater of the poor old fathers who still survived from the 19th of April, to the end that they should testify to his history as he had written it. He was a man so kind and sympathetic, his character was so transparent, and his merits so intelligible to all observers, that he was very justly appreciated in this community. He was a natural gentleman, no dandy, but courtly, hospitable, manly, and public-spirited ; his nature social, his house open to all men. We remember the remark made by the old farmer who used to travel hither from Maine, that no horse from the eastern country would go by the doctor’s gate. Travelers from the 174 MEMOLR. West and North and South bear the like testimony. His brow was serene and open to his visitor, for he loved men, and he had no studies, no occupations, which company could interrupt. His friends were his study, and to see them loos- ened his talents and his tongue. In his house dwelt order and prudence and plenty. There was no waste and no stint. He was open-handed and just and generous. Ingratitude and meanness in his beneficiaries did not wear out his com- passion ; he bore the insult, and the next day his basket for the beggar, his horse and chaise for the cripple, were at their door. Though he knew the value of a dollar as well as an- other man, yet he loved to buy dearer and sell cheaper than others. He subscribed to all charities, and it is no reflec- tion on others to-day that he was the most public-spirited man in the town. The late Dr. Gardiner, in a funeral ser- mon on some parishioner whose virtues did not readily come to mind, honestly said, “ He was good at fires.” Dr. Ripley had many virtues, and yet all will remember that even in his old age, if the fire bell was rung, he was instantly on horse- back with his buckets and bag. He showed even in his fire- side discourse traits of that pertinency and judgment, soften- ing ever and anon into elegancy, which make the distinction of the scholar, and which, under better discipline, might have ripened into a Bentley ora Porson. He had a fore- sight, when he opened his mouth, of all that be would say, and he marched straight to the conclusion. In debate in the vestry or the Lyceum, the structure of his sentences was admirable ; so neat, so natural, so terse, his words fel] like stones ; and often, though quite unconscious of it, his speech was a Satire on the loose, voluminous, draggle-tail periods of other speakers. He sat down when he had done. A man of anecdote, his talk in the parlor was chiefly narrative. We remember the remark of a gentleman who listened with much delight to his conversation at the time when the doctor was preparing to go to Baltimore and Washington, “that a man who could tell a story so well was company for kings and John Quincy Adams.” EZRA RIPLEY, D. D. 175 Sage and savage strove harder in him than in any of my* acquaintance, each getting the mastery by turns, and pretty sudden turns, ‘Save us from the extremity of cold and these violent sudden changes.” ‘The society will meet after the Lyceum, as it is difficult to bring people together in the evening and no moon.” ‘‘Mr. N. F. is dead, and I expect to hear-.of the death of Mr. B. It is cruel to separate old people from their wives in this cold weather.” With a very limited acquaintance with books, his knowl- edge was an external experience, an Indian wisdom, the ob- servation of such facts as country life for nearly a century could supply. He watched with interest the garden, the field, the orchard, the house and the barn, horse, cow, sheep, and dog, and all the common objects that engage the thought of the farmer. He kept his eye on the horizon, and knew the weather like a sea-captain. The usual experiences of men, birth, marriage, sickness, death, burial, the common temptations, the common ambitions, — he studied them all, and sympathized so well in these that he was excellent com- pany and counsel to all, even the most humble and ignorant. With extraordinary states of mind, with states of enthusiasm or enlarged speculation, he had no sympathy, and pretended to none. He was sincere, and kept to his point, and his mark was never remotes His conversation was strictly per- sonal and apt to the party and the occasion. An eminent skill he had in saying difficult and unspeakable things ; in delivering to a man or a woman that which all their other friends had abstained from saying, in uncovering the band- age from a sore place, and applying the surgeon’s knife with a truly surgical spirit. Was a man a sot, or a spendthrift, or too long time a bachelor, or suspected of some hidden crime, or had he quarreled with his wife, or collared his father, or was there any cloud or suspicious circumstances in his be- havior, the good pastor knew his way straight to that point, believing himself entitled to a full explanation, and whatever relief to the conscience of both parties plain speech could 176 MEMOIR. effect was sure to be procured. In all such passages he jus- tified himself to the conscience, and commonly to the love, of the persons concerned. He was the more competent to these searching discourses from his knowledge of family his- tory. He knew everybody’s grandfather, and seemed to ad- dress each person rather as the representative of his house and name, than as an individual. In him have perished more local and personal anecdotes of this village and vicin- ity than is possessed by any survivor. This intimate knowl- edge of families, and this skill of speech, and, still more, his sympathy, made him incomparable in his parochial visits, and in his exhortations and prayers. He gave himself up to his feelings, and said on the instant the best things in the world. Many and many a felicity he had in his prayers, now forever lost, which defied all the rules of all the rhetoricians. He did not know when he was good in prayer or sermon, for he had no literature and no art ; but he believed, and there- fore spoke. He was eminently loyal in his nature, and not fond of adventure’ or innovation. By education, and still more by temperament, he was engaged to the old forms of the New England church. Not speculative, but affectionate ; devout, but with an extreme love of order, he adopted heart- ily, though in its mildest forms, the creed and catechism of the fathers, and appeared a modern Israelite in his attach- ment to the Hebrew history and faith. He was a man very easy to read, for his whole life and conversation were con- sistent. All his opinions and actions might be securely predicted by a good observer on short acquaintance. My classmate at Cambridge, Frederick King, told me from Gov- ernor Gore, who was the doctor’s classmate, that in college he was called Holy Ripley. And now, in his old age, when all the antique Hebraism ‘and its customs are passing away, it is fit that he, too, should depart, — most fit that in the fall of |] : : aws a loyal man should die. 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